Backblaze data shows Hitachi and Seagate as most and least reliable hard drives, respectively


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My last two blog posts were about expected drive lifetimes and drive reliability. These posts were an outgrowth of the careful work that we?ve done at Backblaze to find the most cost-effective disk drives. Running a truly unlimited online backup service for only $5 per month means our cloud storage needs to be very efficient and we need to quickly figure out which drives work.

 

Because Backblaze has a history of openness, many readers expected more details in my previous posts. They asked what drive models work best and which last the longest. Given our experience with over 25,000 drives, they asked which ones are good enough that we would buy them again. In this post, I?ll answer those questions.

 

 

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Source here.

 

Edit: Changed to original source

Edited by Odom
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As a previously long time user of Seagates who lost a lot of data (and still has some drives in a partial state of failure) I agree with these stats.

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Not only Seagate may be the least reliable, but it's hard to get them exchanged. WD drives do fail, especially Green drives have been a headache, but then WD will exchange them without question. Seagate, on the other hand, would require Seatools report. According to Seacrap, multi-terabyte drives can have thousands of reallocated, irrepairable sectors, and due to them - tragically bad performance, but if Seacrap says it's ok, you're SOL - like, it's working, is it not? Only true mechanical failures (calibration retries, seek errors, ) are a given.

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Hello,

Not only Seagate may be the least reliable, but it's hard to get them exchanged.

Really? Ive been in loved with Seagate with that. No questions asked replacement always. Takes about a week to get one to Netherlands to back here.
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All three of my Seagate external HDDs (Oldest one being 7 years old) work without any issues, so I'm sort-of surprised at the failure rate figures shown in the image. :o I guess it just depends on the usage and how well its kept.

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Hello,

Really? Ive been in loved with Seagate with that. No questions asked replacement always. Takes about a week to get one to Netherlands to back here.

 

It may be different for end users. I've had too much trouble with Seagate working in retail without some big a* distributor in between.

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I saw this on Lifehacker yesterday and noticed it's a bit sparse; no Toshiba or Samsung.

 

Samsung doesn't make HDD's anymore. 

Am I the only one in the world who has had no issues with Seagate but had issues with WD?

Well there may be one or two others... so I wouldn't say the only one in the world, but... :p

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I agree with Seagate being least reliable... stats do not surprise me...

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No surprise there...

 

I haven't bought a Seagate hard drive in at least ten years. The last time I did, the one I got failed in less than a month. Ever since then I've bought Western Digital and never looked back.

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Not only Seagate may be the least reliable, but it's hard to get them exchanged. WD drives do fail, especially Green drives have been a headache, but then WD will exchange them without question. Seagate, on the other hand, would require Seatools report. According to Seacrap, multi-terabyte drives can have thousands of reallocated, irrepairable sectors, and due to them - tragically bad performance, but if Seacrap says it's ok, you're SOL - like, it's working, is it not? Only true mechanical failures (calibration retries, seek errors, ) are a given.

 

In my experience they're least reliable too, but so far easy to get replaced. Last time I owned one it started getting bad sectors that were slowly increasing with time. The reallocated count was much less than 1000 but all I had to do was fill out the online RMA form and they exchanged it, no questions asked. Perhaps in your location there have been many fraud attempts and so they do more due diligence and require more proof, but it doesn't seem to be the same everywhere.

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I switched from WD to Seagate about 4 years ago. Honestly though, I've never actually had a hard drive fail (WD or Seagate), despite running my machines 24/7.

 

Maybe I'm just lucky.

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I saw this on Lifehacker yesterday and noticed it's a bit sparse; no Toshiba or Samsung.

Backblaze is a cloud backup provider, meaning lots of hard drives for storage. These statistics were generated from their own experience with failures over the last few years. Unfortunately, given that their servers were only running these three brands of drives, they had no other manufacturers to report on.

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