
Backblaze pulls a Seagate 3TB drive out of service - velodrome
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/
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wtallis
I've had four of these drives in my home server for several months. Until I
completely disabled their built-in power management, they would park the heads
every few minutes. The relevant SMART indicator was on track for them to
exhaust their specified rating for load/unload cycles in about a year. I
haven't noticed any other problems with them yet, but I'm making sure to scrub
the disks weekly and I have some other drives as hot spares to pick up the
slack when the first one fails.

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atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> Yea, likely you're going to be OK with those
drives. We're just reporting on our experience with them. Likely use-cases are
going to be different, especially in a home setting!

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Symbiote
A sample size of one, but I had an external ST3000DM001, attached to an ARM
Linux server, and it failed in about 9 months. In its enclosure, it reported
an "airflow temperature" of 56°C while sitting on my desk.

It had a 2 year warranty, possibly EU rules mean 1 year isn't enough (for home
users).

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wtallis
I think they just bumped the warranty period back up a bit some time after
clearing out the post-flood inventory. My drives bought from newegg in the US
came with a 2-year warranty. I'm more worried about the consequences of the
dumb power management than poor materials and workmanship.

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breakingcups
I love reading Backblaze blog entries. They're very open and informative. In
fact, reading the blog so frequently really convinced me to try out Backblaze
itself, but unfortunately the upload speeds were just way too slow from The
Netherlands. Does anyone know if they operate data centers in Europe already?

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atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> TRY IT AGAIN! We just introduced multi-process
uploading, which has helped some of our users abroad 2x or 3x their speeds!

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smackfu
>In annual terms, 2.7% or the drives failed in 2012, 5.4% failed in 2013 and
47.2% failed in 2014.

I can't figure out where that 47% number is coming from, if the overall
failure rate was 29.5%.

It seems like 1008 out of 4289 drives failed in 2014, or 23.5%.

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TheLoneWolfling
Since when does BackBlaze of all places do blogspam?

    
    
        There’s more if you subscribe…
    
        Signup today to receive the Backblaze Blog in your Inbox and we’ll send you Bonus data and charts from this blog post including the Seagate_3TB_DATA-Summary.xlsx spreadsheet and more.
        Sign up for the Blog
    
        If you’re already a subscriber to the Backblaze Blog, this Bonus material should already be in your inbox – you’re welcome…
    

Complete with capitalized "Bonus". Oh, and this still appears via the RSS
feed. Guess they really want people's email addresses, eh?

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atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> That's actually new. We tried it for the first time
with this post. We don't actually use the email addresses for anything, other
than to send the data. The intent is that you sign up for blog notifications,
and then possibly try the service.

