News Report Claims Hitachi, Seagate HDDs Most Likely to Fail

[TheBeastFromOz]

What the hell do people do to their drives? I have a bunch of drives from Seagate, WD and Samsung, none are younger than 4 years, all have spent their lives in external USB enclosures running 16 hours a day minimum, and all are just fine. I've never had a HDD fail except for a couple of WDs many years back. I suspect that the drives in this survey were laptop drives, and if that's the case then it doesn't mean much as laptops get treated in vastly different ways. You might expect that treatment to average out across brands, but if you have a bunch of one particular drive from, say, a govt dept where they were all treated well (laptops just sat on desks for their entire lives) then that would skew the numbers towards that brand.

The author seems to not understand what he is writing about, he kept talking about "hours amassed", "hours totalled", "accumulated" etc, but all of those hour numbers were averages, not totals. Only once did he mention average lifespan. Same goes for the bad sectors, it wasn't clear if they were average bad sectors per drive or total across all drives. If the latter, then the numbers are meaningless, they needed to be an average for each drive.

Tech writers really seem to be unskilled and unknowledgable nowadays, too many kids straight out of school who think they are tech wizzes, and editors don't seem to know the difference.

 

[TheBeastFromOz]

I remember buying a 500MB hard drive from Costco for $500, (Maxtor). I couldn't believe it was only a Buck a Meg, Years later I bought a 500GB Drive and it was about $250. 1,000 time larger for half the price!

My first HDD was a huge 10MB and it cost AU$700. Yes, this was back in the 80s...

 

[bit_user]

Seagate amassed 32,298

According to the chart, the first two digits were transposed. 32.298 would put Seagate near the top of the heap, but the actual figure of 23,298 puts it squarely in the middle. And, importantly, below Western Digital.

 

[bit_user]

I've been having nothing but problems with more modern (post 2015) WD hard drives. I've had several develop problems or die on me within the last couple years, some that were only a couple months old, some with low usage. Older ones I've had are still chugging along fine though with no errors.

Some must've been made in the window after WD bought HGST but before the merger completed (Chinese regulators dragged their feet on approving it, for several years). During that interim period, WD and HGST each continued to engineer their own HDDs and I'm guessing the WD engineering department got pretty much hollowed out.

This is mostly speculation, on my part. I just know that I bought 4x WD Gold 4 TB drives that were hot, loud, and had one fail in the first 100 hours. I replaced it with a drive that was a WD-rebadged HGST and it was actually cooler, quieter, and faster!

 

[bit_user]

Their solution is to have you mail in the drive, sit on it for weeks and then mail you back some refurbished one. So much for the 3 year warranty they claim.

HDD vendors always fulfill warranty claims by sending you a refurb. I've never heard of someone getting a new drive, even if the one that failed had extremely low hours on it.

 

[3ogdy]

Spent thousands to have Seagate recover data from a drive at the lab in the Netherlands.

Afterwards, I decided to spend the extra money and get HGST Ultrastar HDDs. Not a single failure and no problems for the past 9 years. Can't put Seagate and HGST in the same boat.

Plenty of failed Barracuda drives around me. Not a single Ultrastar.

Maybe the situation has changed lately for HGST (WD), but I'd still get one of their products if I had to. I'm more into migrating towards SSDs these days, though. But cold storage is always welcome.

 

[USAFRet]

Spent thousands to have Seagate recover data from a drive at the lab in the Netherlands.

Why was there not a full backup of this data at the ready?
Would have saved yourself "thousands".

There is no brand or model that is impervious to failure.
Plan for that.

 

[GenericUser]

Some must've been made in the window after WD bought HGST but before the merger completed (Chinese regulators dragged their feet on approving it, for several years). During that interim period, WD and HGST each continued to engineer their own HDDs and I'm guessing the WD engineering department got pretty much hollowed out.

This is mostly speculation, on my part. I just know that I bought 4x WD Gold 4 TB drives that were hot, loud, and had one fail in the first 100 hours. I replaced it with a drive that was a WD-rebadged HGST and it was actually cooler, quieter, and faster!

Yeah, who knows what the real reasons are. I really hope it isn't as simple as "we've permanently lowered our standards and quality to keep dividends up." Multiple drives failing across multiple product lines (Black, Red, and Elements portable drives) across an 8 year span , all with largely varying amounts of use (light to heavy) has made me feel like there's no situation I can really trust them now. I had an archive on a drive that wasn't too old that I rarely access bite the dust with no warning. Only thing that saved me was a backup of that backup, which granted is part of standard practice, but with WD it's starting to feel like I need another layer of redundancy to be able to rest easy.

It's funny you mention the Gold series, since while I wasn't seriously considering one, I actually wondered if that was what I needed if I specifically wanted an HDD and specifically from WD and to have some reasonable semblance of reliability, and your experience, while anecdotal, still gives me pause.

I honestly don't have a huge need for HDD based storage- I just want to know what I do use is going to be reliable within reasonable expectations. 3-2-1 is obviously the backup standard but it's almost feeling like I have to roll with 4-3-2-1 if I want to feel safe with storing any data on a WD HDD.

While HDD's still have relevance to some groups/people, I wonder if the shift towards SSD's across the market as a whole has anything to do with (at least perceived) declining quality. After all, why devote resources to a product that is mostly obsolete for a lot of people?

 

[Deleted member 14196]

You have to do 3-2-1 backup using ANY drive!!! HDD or SSD. IT DOES NOT MATTER. The drive make doesn’t matter either. If you are not using this to back up your data, then you will lose your data at some point.

if you don’t believe me, just keep doing what you’re doing

 

[GenericUser]

You have to do 3-2-1 backup using ANY drive!!! HDD or SSD. IT DOES NOT MATTER. The drive make doesn’t matter either. If you are not using this to back up your data, then you will lose your data at some point.

if you don’t believe me, just keep doing what you’re doing

I don't know if this was directed at me or just in general, but yes, all drives that I use, regardless of make, model, and whether they are SSD or HDD, are all protected via a 3-2-1 scheme, as they should be for everyone who even remotely cares about their data.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

It was directed at anyone who is not doing it currently because we see so many times people log on here saying oh my God I lost my data. What do I do?

 

[GenericUser]

It was directed at anyone who is not doing it currently because we see so many times people log on here saying oh my God I lost my data. What do I do?

Honestly with the amount of times I've seen it happen to people I've known, I've started recommending a time machine after it happens so they can go back to the past and implement proper backup procedures, since it starts to get tedious dealing with.

 

[bit_user]

It's funny you mention the Gold series, since while I wasn't seriously considering one, I actually wondered if that was what I needed if I specifically wanted an HDD and specifically from WD and to have some reasonable semblance of reliability, and your experience, while anecdotal, still gives me pause.

Since 2019 or so, I think they're all HGST drives. That's when I bought the replacement drive (WD Gold-branded) that I later discovered was HGST-designed.

While HDD's still have relevance to some groups/people, I wonder if the shift towards SSD's across the market as a whole has anything to do with (at least perceived) declining quality. After all, why devote resources to a product that is mostly obsolete for a lot of people?

Cloud seems a rather durable market for HDDs, and they actually care about reliability because it costs them money. If HDD reliability slides, they need to increase the number of replicas they keep, which gets very expensive for them. So, rest assured that someone really cares if HDD reliability drops too low.

 

[Dr3ams]

I had a WD Passport die on me. So I went to Ebay to buy the same model. I figured it wasn't the drive itself, but the controller card (or whatever it's called). After the drive arrived I disassembled both of them and swapped the cards. It bricked both of them. Even after I switched the cards back.

 

[Firestone]

These articles are a red herring. If you look at the Backblaze data linked, you will see that there is NO difference in quality of enterprise grade hard drives of 10TB+ size. In fact there's more variability between models, regardless of brand, than there is between brands. So, no, Seagate is not worse than any other brand. If you are suffering from this delusion then I suggest you stop buying consumer grade hard drives and just get enterprise grade drives instead and stop worrying. That would be Seagate Exos and Western Digital Gold. Frankly i don't see the point in quibbling over any other drives when you can get enterprise grade drives so easily these days, just buy literally any 10TB+ drive and you're almost guaranteed to have some of the highest quality drives possible. So stop worrying and stop buying junk consumer gear. There's barely even a price difference anymore between consumer drives and enterprise drives of the same capacity so why settle for less?

 

[lordmogul]

Gotta have a backup anywhere.
Backblaze uses their harddrives for enterprise use cases. That isn't like a desktop at home or cold storage in a closet.

I mean, I had one of the Seagate ST3000DM001, released in 2011, that had extremely high failure rates (according to Backblaze) , and even got the company seud.

Mine ran for 6 years nearly 24/7. Which means either I got the really good batch, they bought the entire bad stock, or there was just a difference in our use cases. And they reported that it was an issue with the parking system, while mine died from failing DRAM cache.

If there is any reason for Seagate to have more reports of drive failure, it's because they have a massive lead in market share. as example, in 2022 they had 43% with WD following with 35% in second place and Toshiba for the remaining 22%. And that is just the sale of new drives, not the amount people already have in use.