From reading this, HGST >>> Seagate, right? I wasn't sure how the "weird" sourcing they had (cracking external drives open during the HDD drought) would affect things, but that was over in 2015, and the trend still seems to be HGST > Seagate.
Yev from Backblaze -> we're not really out to make a definitive "x is better than y" statement, that's just what's occurred in our environment. We've heavily favored HGST in the past, but lately we've been buying a lot of Seagate drives, mostly because for us their failure rates have dropped, and they tend to be more plentifully available and slightly less expensive. Since we built our system to handle hard drive failure, the failure rate is interesting, but the price is what we're more focused on (at least at the moment).
> I wasn't sure how the "weird" sourcing they had (cracking external drives open during the HDD drought) would affect things, but that was over in 2015
That was actually in 2011, all those hard drives have been out of our system for a while!
> We've heavily favored HGST in the past, but lately we've been buying a lot of Seagate drives, mostly because for us their failure rates have dropped, and they tend to be more plentifully available and slightly less expensive.
Are you buying bare drives, or shucking them from enclosures?
> Are you buying bare drives, or shucking them from enclosures?
We haven't had to shuck drives since 2012. And we only started doing that because regular drive prices went up so much due to the Thailand flooding. I believe all those drives have now been replaced as well. If you want a good write-up (along with links to past posts) this is a good "Hard Drive Farming" write-up -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/farming-hard-drives-2-years-a...
Seagate had one horrifically bad, almost guaranteed to fail drive in the sample, the 3TB ST3000DM001. Many many people lost data when they died (according to reviews @ newegg and amazon).
Well, they're entitled to their opinion. It's possible that the problem was fixed and that there are new drives with that model number that don't have the bug.
I personally wouldn't use one for anything more critical than a door stop. Been there, done that, lost some data.
Yeah, I personally wouldn't buy one at this point. It looks a lot like some sort of design or chronic manufacturing flaw. Seagate's version of the IBM Deathstar.
Consider additionally using RAID-1 to increase short-term stability with potentially untrustworthy drives. Not only do you not have to restore from backup as often, you get a nice read rate boost besides!
I wish you had a way to "seed" backups with removable media. I'm a backblaze user but initial backup (I have photo collections) is super slow. Probably not in your pricing model, though.
Yea, that's a bit tough for us to do. We'd have to have a way to tie that to your account from inside our datacenter and that's a bit complicated. Plus we'd have to find a way to charge for that to make up for the additional labor. That might be something we consider for B2, but it's a tougher sell for our personal/business product.
