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...
> 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!