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What is the best hard drive?

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Re: What is the best hard drive?

#121

Post by keerthiko »

atYevP wrote: post #4
mmastrac wrote: post #2

Always love reading HDD reliability stats from Backblaze -- but this demonstrates one of the reasons why post dating is so important, especially when the information in the post is time-sensitive. Nowhere on the page does it say that the post date is today, unless you click the "latest posts" tab by the author below. I had originally though it was a repost of the many older articles from Backblaze until seeing a refe…

Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. It used to be that they were part of the URL (because of the way our blog was designed) but that is no longer the case. We decided to leave them off for a while to see if that made posts more "evergreen", but we definitely see where it can lead to some confusion. We'll keep chatting about it internally, there's likely…

One of my preferred middle-grounds (what I use for my own writing) is to add a "Last updated: " at the bottom or in faded font at the top of my posts. This way the information is there, and useful, but that doesn't mean the post cannot still be relevant today.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#122

Post by Gurkenmaster »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #39
chdir wrote: post #32

The winner of this post, HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital. Their NAS are well rated on Amazon & Newegg. Personally, I'm more concerned about the lifetime of laptop HDD (500GB range). Wonder what's the time frame around which I should swap it out (& what brand)

Given that you can get 512GB M2 SSDs now, I'd say go for that if you're worried about reliability. From what I've read, SSDs are more reliable unless you're trying very hard to wear out their endurance (on the order of 2PB according to http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experim... )

Early SSDs used to die quickly from power failures but then the manufacturers improved them by using better capacitors.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#123

Post by fuzzix »

wiredfool wrote: post #25
userbinator wrote: post #15

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3 TB drives are another story. We’ll cover how we handled their failure rates in a future blog post. I'm really looking forward to this... could it be a similar problem to the one that caused the huge amount of 7200.11 failures a few years ago?

I've got a sample size of 1 on those things. Glad it's not more, cause it made for an unhappy thanksgiving time when it failed.

I have five Seagate branded 3TB external disks, so have no real idea what's inside.

Three of them are dead. I stopped using the others.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#124

Post by Sir_Substance »

atYevP wrote: post #4
mmastrac wrote: post #2

Always love reading HDD reliability stats from Backblaze -- but this demonstrates one of the reasons why post dating is so important, especially when the information in the post is time-sensitive. Nowhere on the page does it say that the post date is today, unless you click the "latest posts" tab by the author below. I had originally though it was a repost of the many older articles from Backblaze until seeing a refe…

Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. It used to be that they were part of the URL (because of the way our blog was designed) but that is no longer the case. We decided to leave them off for a while to see if that made posts more "evergreen", but we definitely see where it can lead to some confusion. We'll keep chatting about it internally, there's likely…

Websites don't go yellow as they get older, and it's really common for data from 10 years ago to seamlessly update so it looks like it was posted yesterday.

If you don't date your articles, they're of casual interest only, because I can't be sure they're current enough to use them as the basis for decisions.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#125

Post by robk »

icodestuff wrote: post #68

Oof. I've got a NAS with 4 3TB Seagate Barracudas, same model number as the drives with the 46% failure rate. One's already failed, and I replaced it with the same model drive. Anyone have a recommendation for how to replace all the drives with more reliable models without wrecking the RAID? Downtime is okay, but I don't have spare space for the contents to make a giant backup. It's currently set up as a "Synology Hy…

How full is your NAS? If you're not that full and your data could fit on one non-RAID hard drive, you can add a 4th drive as a second disk group, copy folders manually in Diskstation to the 4th drive, then pull the other three, create a new 3-disk disk group there, copy back once that's built, then wipe the 4th and add that. That's convoluted but for me was the easiest and most reliable way. With the RAID max_speed tweaks, it was all done in about 72 hours end to end.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#127

Post by hga »

chuckkir wrote: post #82

The Western Digital Velociraptor is pretty tough to beat. Near SSD performance (depending on what you are doing) and reliable. For compiling code it's definitely the best choice.

Ehh; not yet trusting SSDs (or back in 2011 when I did my last computer builds), I prefer 15,000 RPM SAS enterprise drives. 50% greater rotational speed, SAS should be faster than SATA, and even Seagate (true) enterprise disks should be more reliable than WD consumer grade disks.

Now/next time I'll seriously consider SSDs.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#128

Post by techrat »

kw71 wrote: post #12

I've been listening to the discussions of data recovery technicians for many years. As such, I took a guess at the results before the page loaded. And I was right. Seagate bad. Hitachi best. WD almost as reliable as Hitachi. I can recall one or two bad WD models over recent years, the one at the top of my memory is the 500GByte WD5000AAKS. There was a flaw in the WD10EACS that made it park too frequently, but at leas…

Seagate started tanking, not surprisingly, shortly after they acquired Maxtor. Generally the last good stretch of Seagate drives was just before 750GB was the top size.

When the drives started reaching 1TB capacity... There were models where they started throwing Seagate branded drives into Maxtor external cases... And that was when it all went to shit. The infamous 7200.11 series.

Dealing with the 7200.11 drives was like the capacitor plague. They seemed to work well long enough to get other people to buy loads... then the firmware problems... then the sudden head crash problems... then the sudden won't power up anymore after a reboot problems...

All the same kind of shit that people saw with Maxtor post 2GB that caused people to stop using those drives en masse. Those old 2GB Maxtor drives were reliable as fuck, though.

I'd normally end something like this with a bit about how history repeats itself and I fear for the next drive company that will get bought out by Seagate, but when you look at it... We're down to two with a small smattering of subsidiaries that no one can really be sure are rebrands or proper made drives.

Case in point. Hitachi is owned by WD and Samsung HD is owned by Seagate now. Toshiba owns some WD assets and bought out Fujitsu's HD division. Beyond that, not much left.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#129

Post by sillysaurus3 »

gnopgnip wrote: post #33
k-mcgrady wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "makes it less "evergreen"" The evergreen no date thing is fine with me - provided the content itself is actually evergreen. That's the bit people seem to forget. Not dating content doesn't magically make it last forever. If the information is unlikely to expire then I don't need a date. If there is a chance that the information will go out of date, especially if the dated information will not be useful to the rea…

In five years will the failure rate of 3-4tb drives that are harvested from external enclosures matter?

I have no idea why this is downvoted at all, let alone downvoted so heavily. It's correct. The content will be out of date in five years, so it's not evergreen and should be dated.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#130

Post by sukumargv »

The data is not accurate. The stats are literal numbers, Which means these guys are not mentioning how many hard drives each vendor sold. But instead they are just comparing the Faulty drives numbers. If you consider the number of HGST and Seagate pieces sold then only these stats or demographics can be considered reasonable.

Punchline: This review or analysis could be biased.

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