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What is the best hard drive?

backblaze.com

131–140 of 150 posts

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#131
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a general rule, I get really annoyed when I come across a web page and I can't tell how old it is, especially if it is information that is likely to age rapidly. I don't care if putting a date on the page makes it less "evergreen", hurts someones SEO stats or makes the flowers wilt, I just want to know if I can trust what I'm reading.

Yes, dates are really important.

If anybody thinks, readers will skip their article, if the date is too easy to find, why don't you sign the article with the authors name and then let the author decide, if a date has to be added. Like "joe - Nov. 1, 2014" or just "joe".

This article certainly needs a date.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#132

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.

They're not just comparing the faulty drives numbers. Maybe you misunderstood the way they presented the data: in the first table, the "Number of Drives" column refers to the total number of drives they studied for each model, not just the ones that failed. So they give the sample size and the rate of failure for each model.

Or are you saying that the difference in worldwide sales for each drive model somehow renders Backblaze's failure rates invalid? The size of the population is irrelevant unless the size of the sample exceeds a few percent of the total population you are examining.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#133
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…

In fairness to Hitachi, the "Deathstar" was developed on IBM's watch, no?

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a general rule, I get really annoyed when I come across a web page and I can't tell how old it is, especially if it is information that is likely to age rapidly. I don't care if putting a date on the page makes it less "evergreen", hurts someones SEO stats or makes the flowers wilt, I just want to know if I can trust what I'm reading.

Yes, dates are really important. If anybody thinks, readers will skip their article, if the date is too easy to find, why don't you sign the article with the authors name and then let the author decide, if a date has to be added. Like "joe - Nov. 1, 2014" or just "joe". This article certainly needs a date.

When I'm reading articles about tech, I almost always skip the ones without a date, unless they're the last or only source of knowledge on the topic I'm looking for.

An article without a date is about as trustworthy as a scribble on a bathroom stall.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#135

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.

By definition, it's going to be a true analysis of the drives when obtained the way Backblaze obtains them and when used in the environment Backblaze uses them. Both of those may be different from Joe Random consumer.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#136
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…

> There was a flaw in the WD10EACS that made it park too frequently,

I don't know that specific model but frequent parking is not a bug, it's a (highly annoying) feature of (most?) 2.5" and green 3.5"WD drives for some years.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#137
I'll try to find the URL again, but in the mean time, I've read a comment on a thread from a veteran technician saying that hard drives failures were mostly due to heat fluctuations (material expansion) and that without this information, failure rates were not valuable enough.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#138
post #60
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how things can turn around so completely. Around the time of the Deathstar fiasco, you couldn't pay me to use a Hitachi. Seagate was the brand to buy. Now it's the complete opposite.

I still cringe a little bit when I see "Deskstar", but apparently they've turned it around in a big way. I'm still irrationally scared, though.

Same here. I'm surprised they haven't rebranded the line to try to shake the association (like Microsoft seems to be doing with IE).

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#139
post #71
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

hey Yev, how about something secure like TLS 1.2 on the blog? RC4 and 3DES are great if you are playing hackme's at defcon to let people break your 'secure' connections on the fly using laptop GPUs, but not on supposedly Secure Cloud Storage company blog.

Why does it matter here? Are you so worried that someone will eavesdrop on your blog reading?

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#140

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.

Is "compiling code" an IO intensive (IO bound) task?

It certainly can be. Theoretically your OS should be pretty good about caching files in memory, but in practice I've measured significant differences when compiling large C++ projects on a fast SSD.
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