New study finds HGST, WD hard drives fail less often than Seagate and Toshiba

[toooooot]

What happened with the brands that where so extremely robust? I still have 4x 160GB Samsung disks that work, after 20+ years lol. Seagate is the worst in my experience, and my personal problem is, it is been going on for years, the high failure rate those drives have. Never they have improved anything really and the failure rate of those things is still too high.

I used to run a HDD recovery service, varying from PCB swaps, MCU flashes, platter swaps, the whole thing. The brands that where always in by default where either seagate or WD, apart from the models that where dropped on accident.

The bigger they got, the less reliable they became. I remember so well the early drives. They were bulletproof except for laptop HDDs, those were always crap in my experience.
Then there was that great flood in the biggest HDD factory which resulted in huge quantities of drives that were dying within first year of use. Then they improved a bit, probably because so many people got frustrated with high failure rate. I remember when well most hard drive companies dropped warranties from 3-5 years to one year. That was literally like a flashing "do not buy" sign.
I think we will never return to the early days of reliable hard drives. I think a lot of drives bigger than 4tb
are a lot less reliable. And my own drives prove this theory.

 

[J Oelschl]

My anecdotal evidence concurs with this study. My first HDD failure was a Seagate Barracuda 3TB. It did not last 2 years. The only WD that I had die was a 4TB WD Purple. It isnt dead yet but has growing number of bad sectors so it isnt used for anything other than scratch. It may have been a victim of a Thermaltake BlackX external SATA dock that used eSata. Supposedly these were known drive killers because of dodgy chipset and poor power supplies. WD Black or Gold for me please.

 

[robert40]

I never had any problem with WD I have lots of.over 15 years old .The worst was for me Corsair ssd.

 

[Matthew77]

That's BS, I've had countless WD hdd, all failed in one for or another and guess what HDD I have in my system for years now, TOSHIBA and SEAGATE !

Although I understand your viewpoint, your data set is one person. Backblaze ran the numbers, Peer-reviewed study of 443,000 and Seagate and Toshiba had much higher failure rates compared to WD.

 

[Deathdealers747]

I've only ever owned WDs and Samsung and, personally, haven't had any problems with them. I've currently got 2 older model WD Drives in my PC: a SATA III WD 500GB Blue SSD and a 1 TB WD Blue HDD.

The 1 TB WD Blue HDD has a total Power Cycle Count of 6,999 and Power On Hours of 1,429.2 Days, according to Speccy 1.34.084 (64-bit).

The 500 GB WD Blue SATA III SSD has a total Power Cycle Count of 5,475 and Power On Hours of 1,021.0 Days, according to Speccy 1.34.084 (64-bit).

They're both still running just fine. No slowdowns. No hardware failure.

I make sure to keep my PC cleaned every 6 months and ensure that they have enough spacing with a dedicated fan blowing on them some cool air. They maintain an average 80 Degrees Fahrenheit on idle and go up to 87 Degrees Fahrenheit when being used with a game on the SSD. I mostly just use the WD Blue HDD these days as 'Cold Storage' to hold my photos, videos, music, documents, etc.

 

[captaincranky]

@Loadedaxe So then, would it be fair to say the "BBDFI", (Back Blaze Drive Failure Index), is as worthless to any specific individual, as is the CPI. In other words, "a statistic for statistic's sake"?

Personally, I think they publish it every year or so, just to let us know they're still around, should we need them.

The only HDD I've had fail on it's own was a Seagate 2TB. My lone ATX board w/ Intel's RAID software, kicked it out of the array before a single byte was written to it. To be fair, at $50.00 a pop, I pretty much accepted that they were throwaways to begin with. Besides, if I were to lose 2TB of "erotic art:**", I figured should the worst come to pass, there was plenty more available where that came from.

In other news, did you ever wonder how closely Google tracks us? When Google began infiltrating Gmail with ads, I chose the "send me anything" option, as opposed having the ads being, "tailored to my interests". I figured that getting ads for sh!t I didn't need, like, want, or would ever use, would save me money in the long run. I also considered that I was, "doing Google a favor", by helping them screw advertisers out of money they'd have no hope of getting any ROI on. The ads are getting weirder by the day. That's in spite of the fact I'm having to live with the regret of not snapping up one of those shipping containers I was offered the other day.

Ebay's another entity that hangs on to a prospect like a rabid pit bull. After you've bought, paid for, was shipped, and you've received it, you're still getting competing offers for the exact same item for weeks.

Anyway, a day or so after we discussed the price of king crab legs here, I got an ad from an Alaskan fishing company, graciously offering me, "wild caught, Alaskan golden king crab legs", at a mere $98.00, for "about" a pound. Ah, it's probably just a "coincidence". (Sometimes it's comforting to lie to yourself.)

Anyway, I deeply regret going so far off topic. (That's assuming this was a topic to begin with.) I can still list the life, death, and current location of every HDD I've ever owned, if you'd "like".

One thing I do have a certain amount of angst about, is whether of not the WD 750 1TB HDme drive I bought at $10.00 below market from a pawn shop some months ago, is counterfeit. Eighty bucks then, only "god" knows how much today. One look at the prices in Newegg's emails today, is enough to make me consider reporting them as spam.

As always... Cheers..!

** AKA "smut"

 

[Loadedaxe]

@captaincranky I think that’s fair point.

The BBDFI is pretty useless for telling you whether the WD sitting in your case is going to survive another five years, just as the CPI doesn’t tell you whether your grocery bill went up 3%, 12%, or required the sale of a kidney.

I guess it still has value at the population level. If several hundred thousand drives repeatedly show one manufacturer failing at materially lower rates after accounting for age, capacity, temperature, etc., that tells us something about relative risk.

It just doesn’t tell us what happens to drive serial number 7H3B-whatever sitting under your desk next Tuesday.

That seems to be the distinction half this comment section has misplaced.

“My Seagate lasted 14 years” and “my WD died in six months” are both perfectly valid autobiographies. Neither is a reliability study.

As for your 2TB collection of culturally significant historical imagery, I agree RAID intervention was probably the merciful outcome.

And if Google starts advertising 1TB pawn shop WD drives immediately after this discussion, I’m blaming you.

As always... Cheers..!

 

[Hotlynx16]

I knew it, Seagate has been crap for a while, in my 28 years of working and building PC's I have seen more Segate's and Toshiba's fail more than than WD's! Especially in the last 8 years! Seems like their drives started going to crap when they took over Samsung drives in 2011!

 

[Hotlynx16]

The bigger they got, the less reliable they became. I remember so well the early drives. They were bulletproof except for laptop HDDs, those were always crap in my experience.
Then there was that great flood in the biggest HDD factory which resulted in huge quantities of drives that were dying within first year of use. Then they improved a bit, probably because so many people got frustrated with high failure rate. I remember when well most hard drive companies dropped warranties from 3-5 years to one year. That was literally like a flashing "do not buy" sign.
I think we will never return to the early days of reliable hard drives. I think a lot of drives bigger than 4tb
are a lot less reliable. And my own drives prove this theory.

I slightly remember hearing about the Great Flood flooding a hard drive Factory!