Hard drive quality - finding out the hard way ?

[Myriad]

Buying bulk memory can be a big cash investment and I don't care too much about the maker's warranty ,
realistically , it only covers a total fail , and for a relatively short period , and with all consequential losses excluded .

I'm much more interested in expected life-spans and longer-term failure rates , which can be very hard to find ,
( I don't bother looking on makers websites )

A firm called Backblaze run a truly staggering number of hard drives , 24/7 , until they start to show fatal signs.

What We've Learned from Running 61,590 Hard Drives in Our Data Center

What's good for us is that they freely publish their stats online , including all of the failure rates ,
indexed by make , size and other parameters .

I'd like to know more about their diagnostics , eg. is it all in-house stuff ?
Or maybe they use the well tried and trusted HD Sentinel ?? - ( myself , I never leave home without it )

It might sound as dull as dish-water to read , but I wouldn't even think of buying any HDD/SSD
without having a look there first .

A couple of things I noticed -

They don't run many of the latest / biggest drives , but they have many thousands of mid-size spinners running .
There is very little mention about SSDs in relation to their overall operation .

They certainly have some good articles to read on memory in general , for anyone interested -

A History of Hard Drives

Seagate Introduces a 60TB SSD – Is a 3.6PB Storage Pod Next?

I tend to trust what they say because (a) they don't make drives , and (b) they don't sell them ,

they just thrash the living daylights out of them

 

[shmu26]

Buying bulk memory can be a big cash investment and I don't care too much about the maker's warranty ,
realistically , it only covers a total fail , and for a relaitively short period , and with all consequential losses excluded .

I'm much more interested in expected life-spans and longer-term failure rates , which can be very hard to find ,
( I don't bother looking on makers websites )

A firm called Backblaze run a truly staggering number of hard drives , 24/7 , until they start to show fatal signs.

What We've Learned from Running 61,590 Hard Drives in Our Data Center

What's good for us is that they freely publish their stats online , including all of the failure rates ,
indexed by make , size and other parameters .

Myself , I'd like to know more about their diagnostics , eg. is it all in-house stuff ?
Or maybe they use the well tried and trusted HD Sentinel ? ? - I never leave home without it

It might sound as dull as dish-water to read , but I wouldn't even think of buying any HDD/SSD
without having a look there first .

A couple of things I noticed -

They don't run many of the latest / biggest drives , but they have many thousands of mid-size spinners running .
There is very little mention about SSDs in relation to their overall operation .

They certainly have some good articles to read on memory in general , for anyone interested -

A History of Hard Drives
Seagate Introduces a 60TB SSD – Is a 3.6PB Storage Pod Next?

I tend to trust what they say because (a) they don't make drives , and (b) they don't sell them ,
they just thrash the living daylights out of them

if you read their stats carefully you will see that there are big differences between the sizes of the hard drives.
For instance, seagate 3 TB drives were terrible, but other sizes were not.
just saying from memory, check it out for yourself. But I do remember that the size factor was important.

 

[Myriad]

if you read their stats carefully you will see that there are big differences between the sizes of the hard drives.
For instance, seagate 3 TB drives were terrible, but other sizes were not.
....

Just so , and that's what makes the Backblaze data really valuable , IMO .
And bad luck for any folk who bought those 3 TB drives by the crate load , eh ?

On a related topic -

I looked around for hard drive destruction methods , and if you really must have scrubbing , degaussing , incineration
AND running them through a metal grinder ..... guess what ? ... it's all available

Here's one example of where we can get those types of service , Datastroyer .

Products available to suit all levels of budget , and paranoia ...

Fascinating stuff ! .... or not ?

 

[_CyberGhosT_]

@Myriad
Thanks for this very educational post, I have book marked that site.

 

[shmu26]

I wish Hitachi hard drives were more readily available. Blackblaze gave them a good rating, and I had a good experience with one myself, but I can hardly find them for sale in normal sizes.

 

[Myriad]

@shmu26
Good call !

They were most excellent drives , no question.

Hitachi split-off their HD division into Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in 2003 , then Western Digital acquired the business
in 2012 , and that was effectively the end of Hitachi as an independent drive manufacturer.

Last year I was given a few dozen unwanted old laptops from a former IT training center , and there were various HDDs inside ,
some were Hitachi drives , which I kept .
Then I secure wiped the others , and ran a grinder through them .

But those Hitachi drives are staying right here

 

[shmu26]

@shmu26
Good call !

They were most excellent drives , no question.

Hitachi split-off their HD division into Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in 2003 , then Western Digital acquired the business
in 2012 , and that was effectively the end of Hitachi as an independent drive manufacturer.

Last year I was given a few dozen unwanted old laptops from a former IT training center , and there were various HDDs inside ,
some were Hitachi drives , which I kept .
Then I secure wiped the others , and ran a grinder through them .

But those Hitachi drives are staying right here

if and when you figure out which HDDs available today are the most reliable, please keep us posted!

 

[DC47561]

I don't know what you guys think of Seagate but I've had pretty good experience with mine so far. apart from head parking - tick, tick, tick.