6TB hard drive reliability?

[kathayes]

I want to get some HGST 6TB hard drives to use to backup other drives. I know the 3 and 4TB HGST drives have been found to be reliable, though does anyone know anything about the 6TB ones?

Thanks.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

In general, the bigger the drive, the higher the failure rate. However failure rate is measured by drives returned between 6 and 12 months before the end of the reporting period.... so the this2016 report, I expect it was for drivers purchased that were 6 - 12 months old on March 31 2016

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/947-6/disques-durs.html

The failure rate for the last 2 periods was a combined :

HGST: 0.70 %
Seagate: 0.64 %
WD: 0.95 %
Toshiba: 1.05 %

OTOH... look at the 5 worst drives and most of them are all large 3-4 TB drives. Does that mean 6 TB drives are fine ? No. The absence of a drive in the list doesn't mean it had a low failure rate ... it just means they did not sell enough to reach a statistical threshold which would make the data have any reliability. So with a) 6 TB drives not being big sellers and b) HGST not being as high up in sales against the competition, it's likely that sales didn't cross the threshold to be included in the report. In short, no data available.

You could look at the new backblaze data if you want something completely irrelevant to desktop usage but on;y applies to usage in a server farm. Consumer drives include a feature called "head parking" which is very important in desktop environments... including HP in server drives means the very feature that protects them in a desktop environment is the cause of premature failure in a server environment.

In short, no reliable data exists for which to draw a conclusion other than that, in general, larger drives sit atop the most failed lists with 3 and 4 TB drives topping the list for last 2 reporting periods.

 

[kathayes]

Thank you for your response. Does the technology being crammed into larger sized drives like the 6TB ones increase the possible failure rates? Is there some point where increasing the size of hard drive capacity is no longer a good idea, sort of like cramming camera optics into smart phones that can't really support the technology without creating noise?