
What is the best hard drive? - tolien
http://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive
======
mmastrac
Always love reading HDD reliability stats from Backblaze -- but this
demonstrates one of the reasons why post dating is so important, especially
when the information in the post is time-sensitive. Nowhere on the page does
it say that the post date is today, unless you click the "latest posts" tab by
the author below.

I had originally though it was a repost of the many older articles from
Backblaze until seeing a reference to Dec 31 2014. While not terribly
ambiguous now, the ambiguity will only grow as the year marches on.

If someone from Backblaze happens to see this: you don't need to put it in
your URL, but please date your post near the top or bottom of the text.

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put
dates on everything. It used to be that they were part of the URL (because of
the way our blog was designed) but that is no longer the case. We decided to
leave them off for a while to see if that made posts more "evergreen", but we
definitely see where it can lead to some confusion. We'll keep chatting about
it internally, there's likely a good middle-ground.

~~~
rootbear
As a general rule, I get really annoyed when I come across a web page and I
can't tell how old it is, especially if it is information that is likely to
age rapidly. I don't care if putting a date on the page makes it less
"evergreen", hurts someones SEO stats or makes the flowers wilt, I just want
to know if I can trust what I'm reading.

~~~
mironathetin
Yes, dates are really important.

If anybody thinks, readers will skip their article, if the date is too easy to
find, why don't you sign the article with the authors name and then let the
author decide, if a date has to be added. Like "joe - Nov. 1, 2014" or just
"joe".

This article certainly needs a date.

~~~
pavel_lishin
When I'm reading articles about tech, I almost always skip the ones without a
date, unless they're the last or only source of knowledge on the topic I'm
looking for.

An article without a date is about as trustworthy as a scribble on a bathroom
stall.

------
kw71
I've been listening to the discussions of data recovery technicians for many
years. As such, I took a guess at the results before the page loaded.

And I was right. Seagate bad. Hitachi best. WD almost as reliable as Hitachi.

I can recall one or two bad WD models over recent years, the one at the top of
my memory is the 500GByte WD5000AAKS. There was a flaw in the WD10EACS that
made it park too frequently, but at least it had a parking ramp.

Hitachi has been a good vendor since the "deathstar" glass platter fiasco blew
over. Now: Deskstar 7K's forever!

On the other hand, Seagate seems to ship flaw after flaw. Lately they tend to
have spindle bearings that die if the drive gets bumped. If that doesn't
happen, surely a head will go bad.

~~~
xienze
It's funny how things can turn around so completely. Around the time of the
Deathstar fiasco, you couldn't pay me to use a Hitachi. Seagate was the brand
to buy. Now it's the complete opposite.

~~~
gtaylor
I still cringe a little bit when I see "Deskstar", but apparently they've
turned it around in a big way. I'm still irrationally scared, though.

~~~
morcheeba
Me, too. I put one in my RAID, with part of my strategy is to use a variety of
manufacturers and drive types so the drives don't fail all at once. This one
is 50x the capacity of my cursed 75GXP...

[http://www.computerhistory.org/groups/storagesig/media/docs/...](http://www.computerhistory.org/groups/storagesig/media/docs/DS_IBM%2075GXP%20Family_20121031.pdf)

------
joshstrange
Let me start off by saying I am a Backblaze customer and I LOVE these posts
and use them as my bible for buying drives for my NAS/Media Server.

With that said this is going to sound a little nitpicky but why isn't the
publication date anywhere on this article? I've noticed a growing number of
blogs not putting the publish date anywhere on the blog page which makes it
really hard to know if what they say is still valid. In this case you can
infer from the dates of the drives they tested that it was published in 2015
but a number of blogs don't have those clues in the blog to let you know when
it was posted. Normally you can look at the URL to see the date but BB uses
slugs off /blog/ so you can't get the date from there either.

~~~
brianwski
Backblaze engineer here, the blog folks are trying to fix it right now. I also
hate "evergreen" blog posts that don't include a date, I wasn't aware we were
doing that. :-(

~~~
atYevP
Backblaze blog folk here -> change is hard :-(

------
dragontamer
I love the data, but I'm a little mad that Hitachi had to die as a company and
got sold into pieces.

I'm not sure if I trust what you guys did, calling the old Hitachi Drives as
HGST. Technically, the 3.5" drives from Hitachi got sold to Toshiba.

For example, the Toshiba DT01ACA300 is allegedly the same design as the
Hitachi 7k3000.

In the following link, note that the "HDS723030BLE640" is the model number to
the 7k3000 with ridiculously low failure rates in the Backblaze study.

[http://goughlui.com/2013/02/26/toshiba-dt01aca300-aka-
hitach...](http://goughlui.com/2013/02/26/toshiba-dt01aca300-aka-hitachi-
hds723030ble640-drives/)

I don't know if HGST drives are related to the old Hitachi models at all.

Again, I hate to criticize such awesome research that you've given away for
free in your blog. But I'd definitely would like some research and
clarification on the Hitachi -> Toshiba or Hitachi -> HGST situation.

~~~
RickHull
> I'm not sure if I trust what you guys did, calling the old Hitachi Drives as
> HGST.

> I don't know if HGST drives are related to the old Hitachi models at all.

FTA:

> _Some of the HGST drives listed were manufactured under their previous
> brand, Hitachi. We’ve been asked to use the HGST name and we have honored
> that request._

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _We’ve been asked to use the HGST name and we have honored that request._ //

Intriguing - that suggests some sort of advertising deal? Which calls in to
question the impartiality of the report.

Who asked them? In what context? Why accede to a third parties interference in
the report?

Are Backblaze getting reduced price HGST drives now?

~~~
geofft
I'm a little confused why we expect people to be hostile to friendly requests
in the absence of back-room dealing... what's the harm in saying "sure" and
including that footnote? And don't we expect enough human decency for them to
mention if there were financial considerations in the reporting?

~~~
dragontamer
The "harm" is in misinformation, and damage to the brand.

The Hitachi 5K3000 and Hitachi 7K3000 are amongst the most reliable hard
drives in the report. Those drives are 3 years or more old and yet have some
of the lowest failure rates in the study.

Unfortunately, Hitachi doesn't exist anymore. Hitachi as a company was split
and sold in pieces. It is either HGST (owned by WD) or Toshiba.

I want to buy the 7k3000 today. Which hard drive manufacturer is making the
modern equivalent? Is it the Toshiba DT01ACA300, or is it the "HGST Deskstar"
??

Despite sharing the same branding, I don't think HGST Deskstar is in fact from
the same factory as the Hitachi Deskstars. When you look at the HGST
Deskstars, they have WD Technology in them ("Coolspin" RPM).

The Toshiba DT01ACA300 has very similar performance characteristics to the old
Hitachi 7k3000 drive.

So its a confusing situation. Which is why I'd like clarification. I bet that
the Toshiba DT01ACA300 is actually the super-reliable hard drive that I want,
but I admit that I'm a bit ignorant on this front.

~~~
geofft
Switching factories could certainly happen without a corporate structure
change, though, right?

If it's important to track this information, I think it's relevant to mention
it specifically, and I'd expect an honest review to discuss important changes
like this (if they're aware of them), regardless of the brand names mentioned.
If HGST requested that the review not mention a change in factory or
technology, or refused to answer questions about it, then yes, I'd suspect
malice somewhere.

------
chdir
The winner of this post, HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies)
is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital. Their NAS are well rated on
Amazon & Newegg.

Personally, I'm more concerned about the lifetime of laptop HDD (500GB range).
Wonder what's the time frame around which I should swap it out (& what brand)

~~~
seanp2k2
Given that you can get 512GB M2 SSDs now, I'd say go for that if you're
worried about reliability. From what I've read, SSDs are more reliable unless
you're trying very hard to wear out their endurance (on the order of 2PB
according to [http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-
experim...](http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-
two-freaking-petabytes) )

~~~
penguat
but there can be some interesting not-a-failure modes, I know because I
suffered one and the recovery was a nightmare due to overly-protective UEFI.
Fortunately, anything on my local SSD is only in cache and not to be worried
about ;) (and I managed to put the UEFI in dumb mode so it wouldn't interfere)

~~~
derekp7
For the "not-a-failure" modes, are you referring to things like flipped bits?
I had that happen on a USB3 high-speed thumb drive, where several of my source
code files had random capitalization throughout the file (bit 6 was flipped
on) and other weird corruption that indicated specific bits got either flipped
on or off. But the drive was at 98% full when this happened too.

------
icodestuff
Oof. I've got a NAS with 4 3TB Seagate Barracudas, same model number as the
drives with the 46% failure rate. One's already failed, and I replaced it with
the same model drive.

Anyone have a recommendation for how to replace all the drives with more
reliable models without wrecking the RAID? Downtime is okay, but I don't have
spare space for the contents to make a giant backup. It's currently set up as
a "Synology Hybrid RAID" that looks an awful lot like a RAID 5.

~~~
switch007
Without a backup, you need a temporary, identical NAS device with the 4 new
disks. Then do a file-level copy. Then put the 4 new disks in the old NAS and
import the array. Do you know of a store with a very lenient returns policy?

An online capacity expansion (replacing one at a time) will mean a very long
time in a degraded state, possible multiple disk failures, increased chances
of data loss (power goes off, etc)

------
moe
While I love these recurring blog posts, it would be even nicer if Backblaze
could wrap a public API and/or pretty interface around their live monitoring.

I'd happily pay a small fee for access to an up-to-date snapshot when I'm in
the market for harddrives.

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> Not a bad idea, though that might take a lot of
work on our end. In the mean time, we're going to be releasing some raw data
in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that!

------
userbinator
_The Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3 TB drives are another story. We’ll cover how
we handled their failure rates in a future blog post._

I'm really looking forward to this... could it be a similar problem to the one
that caused the _huge_ amount of 7200.11 failures a few years ago?

~~~
shampine
Are you referring to the botched firmware ones (I think the firmware revision
was SD15)?

If so, at the time (~2008) I had an HTPC with 10 1TB-1.5TB drives with 6 of 10
affected by the firmware issues. I was able to successfully flash all my
drives at the time with no data loss.

~~~
onethree
i built a pc for a family friend around that time... i'd spec'd it with a
different drive, but they showed it to the IT guy at their work who
recommended seagate. 6 months later the drive stopped working, and it had to
be shipped to the other side of the world to be reflashed

~~~
shampine
Sadly you could only flash them if they were still working, you had to ship
them if they bricked. I saw the bulletin and promptly flashed all mine before
failure. Big pita tho.

------
udev
Looks like Seagate drives are at a very good price point for them, enough to
compensate for the higher failure rates.

It looks like Blackblaze managed to build a system with good fault tolerance,
such that they can control the $-price/failure-rate ratio as they need.

In summary: \- HGST, good \- WD, expensive (in bulk) \- Seagate, we buy them
despite failures

------
joering2
I think there has never been more personal piece of technology than your full
of important data hard drive, especially pre-cloud era, when now people just
don't worry much of a dying hardware.

But back in the ole' days, every one of us have lost very personal data due to
hardware failure at some point. And it's interesting how the opinion about
brands are being formed.

For example, my first drive that died was Seagate. Surprise surprise my
opinion about said company is very low now. But in most part, it's very bias
opinion, especially given the fact I have never owned another Seagate for the
reason of crash. I love WD and never had one failed, currently about 20 full
of data. But I met bunch of folks who hate WD and had them crush and they lost
important data. And they love Seagate.

It's interesting how opinions about hard drives are being formed throughout
our lives.

~~~
schneider_sh
I had the opposite issue. Bought WD Black for my first PC build. It died
within ~3 weeks. Bought another to replace it. Again dead within a month. Have
about 8 Seagate drives now and have not had an issue at all. Will avoid WD at
all costs now.

------
valarauca1
I can't load this site because blackblaze only supports 2 TLS ciphers.
TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA, TLS_RSA_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA

~~~
cbhl
Have you tried using Google Chrome?

~~~
rockdoe
I think his point is that neither of those are secure.

------
agumonkey
I'll try to find the URL again, but in the mean time, I've read a comment on a
thread from a veteran technician saying that hard drives failures were mostly
due to heat fluctuations (material expansion) and that without this
information, failure rates were not valuable enough.

------
cjensen
Love and appreciate that Backblaze presents this data, but there are some
obvious issues: comparing the annual failure rate of a pool where avg. age is
1 year to a pool where avg. age is 3 years isn't a great comparison.

Rather than annual rates, I'd really prefer to see failure rate after six
months, one year, two years, etc. This would make it easier to answer
questions like "was drive X always bad? Or just when new? Or just when old?"

~~~
brianwski
Backblaze employee here - we're going to release the raw data in a couple
weeks, so everybody can do their own analysis.

~~~
deanclatworthy
Can't wait for this, but it'd be great if you considered having "real-
time"-ish data feed for everyone to hook into. Then we don't have to wait for
the annual blog post ;-)

------
zkhalique
The top two rows seem to be contradictory. How can you have a smaller annual
failure rate AND a smaller average age?

    
    
      Name/Model	    Size    	Number of Drives 	Average Age in years	Annual Failure Rate	95% Confidence Interval
      HGST Deskstar 7K2000
      (HDS722020ALA330)	2.0 TB	4,641	3.9	1.1%	0.8% – 1.4%
      HGST Deskstar 5K3000
      (HDS5C3030ALA630)	3.0 TB	4,595	2.6	0.6%	0.4% – 0.9%

~~~
sib
Reading the model numbers and sizes, the top row is 2TB drives, the second row
is 3TB; the 3TB were launched more recently. So, they have a smaller average
age. And, apparently, they also fail at a lower rate.

------
tracker1
Interesting, I built a home FreeNAS a few years ago, with Seagate 3TB drives,
7200.12 iirc, and saw 3 of them (out of 12) fail well under 2 years... at this
point, I've had so many issues, it's pretty much sitting there. I put 4x4tb WD
reds into my older Synology NAS and have been using that without issue.

------
ck2
It's a shame single platter 1TB drives were not in that test.

I bet they are the most reliable because of single platter.

------
Norp
This sums up my experience with Seagate. I bought my first Barracuda 3TB two
months ago, it died out 20 days later with the notorious two-click sound.

I can't even be bothered to push warranty for replacement, terrible. Sticking
with WD from now on.

------
fivedogit
This same URL was submitted an hour earlier and got 4 upvotes. This one has
222 as I write this.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923016](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923016)

Timing is everything, I guess.

~~~
atYevP
Much like comedy!

------
notacoward
Dup of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8922996](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8922996)
submitted almost two hours earlier.

~~~
ciupicri
You've posted a broken URL: "Post not available".

~~~
notacoward
I guess I have Backblaze to thank for that. It was a valid URL when I posted
it. _sigh_

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> we saw that and couldn't track it down or figure
out where it came from, the post itself didn't change since we published it
this morning. Sorry Notacoward :(

------
HNaTTY
I'm super excited for the new Seagate 8tb drives @$260/each.

Please order a carton of them and let us know ASAP how they work for you!

------
sukumargv
The data is not accurate. The stats are literal numbers, Which means these
guys are not mentioning how many hard drives each vendor sold. But instead
they are just comparing the Faulty drives numbers. If you consider the number
of HGST and Seagate pieces sold then only these stats or demographics can be
considered reasonable.

Punchline: This review or analysis could be biased.

~~~
pierrec
They're not just comparing the faulty drives numbers. Maybe you misunderstood
the way they presented the data: in the first table, the "Number of Drives"
column refers to the total number of drives they studied for each model, not
just the ones that failed. So they give the sample size and the rate of
failure for each model.

Or are you saying that the difference in worldwide sales for each drive model
somehow renders Backblaze's failure rates invalid? The size of the population
is irrelevant unless the size of the sample exceeds a few percent of the total
population you are examining.

------
DanBC
Is there any idea which drives were shucked or not shucked from external
enclosures?

------
btown
Does anyone know if HGST's 1TB hard drives follow this reliability trend?

~~~
kw71
7K1000's are fantastic in my experience

------
adad95
Hum... I think this explain my one dying drive at home. (4 Seagate drives)

------
chuckkir
The Western Digital Velociraptor is pretty tough to beat. Near SSD performance
(depending on what you are doing) and reliable. For compiling code it's
definitely the best choice.

~~~
penguat
Unless you could use an SSD? (most people who compile code are valuable enough
that their time warrants the fastest thing available, no?)

------
Shivetya
so on a given day, or by week, how many drives do you replace?

