Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q3 2016

Are WD slipping in quality?

 

People say Seagate sucks, check out my 4 year old ST2000DM001 which is working almost non stop, and for long period of time i even used it as system hdd.



I'd say it's holding pretty well.

 

no they just stall at the moment while seagate, as an exemple, rise it's quality...

i feel nerve at each time seagate drive do "dzzzzzee" noise but yeah they do the job quite well at work with no fail since years.

 

I've relied on WD alone ever since Samsung dropped out of the business, but based on the trend visible in this article, I might as well just go for whichever is cheaper, WD or Seagate, as Seagate looks no worse at all anymore. This is of course better for the consumer.

Although who knows the model to model variance. Manufacturers have occasionally have unlucky models.

 

Thank you for stating your 1 (one) (just to be clear, this is ONE drive) statistics that mean absolutely nothing when it comes to how often something fails. If something has a 75% failrate, that still means you could possibly be in the 25%, but that doesn't mean it would something people would want to risk.

Now it does seem like seagate has up'd there game, which is great, but that doesn't negate their past.

Why not go HGST? I mean i know HGST is technically western digital now, by name, but their drives and consistantly and still currently have some of the lowest failrates of all drives.

 

Because they are expensive and I'm a cheap person...

 

Yes, but one drive as a statistic is meaningless. Majority of SG drives should be no problem. Just that they traditionally have had a higher failure rate than others.

I have 3 SG drives in as many years, 2 are fine, one is dead. Again, doesnt mean much, you need to look to at least a 1000 drives to get a fuller picture.

 

For me WD have 100% failure rate. out of 5 i used 4 died just 6-12 months after end of warranty, and last one 6 months till warranty end and replacement died 12 months later.
On other hand I had about 20 seagate drives with 300GB, 1TB, 1.5TB, 3TB and 6TB size and only got 1 dead and 3 bad ones from faulty line that had issues with high failing disk sectors (catched by smart and recovered nearly all data with only 9 files out of ~700k unreadable).

2 years ago I switched to Seagate Enterprise disks with 5 years waranty instead of 2 and so far much better performance and no issues (100% health according to smart)

 

I've had three Seagate hard drive fail in the last five years which is why the last hard drive I bought was a Western Digital Black. It was expensive for a 2 TB drive though.

I do have four hard drives in my system though (3 for games totalling 8 TBs and one internal 1 TB for backups plus three external USB 3.0 backup drives for another 4.5 TBs) so I guess the chance of one of those drives failing is statistically much higher than, say, someone who just has one or two.

 

HDD hardware fails are complete roulette. Some people just won that roulette many times thus the assumptions. I would trust investigations like this which try out many HDDs rather than what some people say judging from their 2-3 HDDs they bought over the years.

 

"Just" had another se agate HDD fail on me. That will make three drives out the seven I bought from seven years ago thst have failed. Sorry excuse of a storage company to have that much of a failure rate amongst its hardware.

Must have been part of an inside job as I got these 500gb HDD's for cents in the dollar when the promotion was going on. Now I can see why...

Not sure if I'll ever buy another HDD from seagate.

 

based on table the WD drive they use is red that for NAS...
although NAS should designed for 24/7
not sure if there relation to wear and tear
as most SOHO NAS usually rather light usage, different to datacenter


for seagate, if we look from the table, the failure seems low
much better than few couple years ago
but blackbaze using many ST4000DM000
ST4000DX000 on other hand have failure rate similar to rest/other hdd

conclusion for me personally, think that hdd reliability (all brand combined) nowdays perform similar enough, around 4% annualized failure rate

toshiba is HGST rebranded drives, so it can be they using cheaper parts or whatever changes...
price-wise though, usually toshiba is cheapest out 3 hdd maker (wd/seagate)

 

Seagate went through a phase of having issues with some of their 3TB models quite some time back. The rest were OK though and I have been very happy with the 2x 4TB I have so far running 24/7 for almost 2 years now.



\rambling upgrade thoughts spilled out:

They were the ST4000DM000 model, I managed to pick them up new on ebay for about £85 each with a little patience


I have 2 of those excellent old Samsung 1TB Spinpoint drives I am about to retire from my main PC which have both been running for about 5 years now!
Over many years I've had quite a few HDD failures, but that pretty much stopped once I started to normally archive drives that hit 2.5 to 3 years of usage. I feel quite nervous about those Samsungs atm.

Probably going to buy another of those 4TB Seagates and put the 3 of them in my NAS box and upgrade its old 1TB Seagate drives (I always use old drives for long term archiving backups on a shelf some place away from home)


One of those new 8TB Seagates will be nice in my main computer ^^
or 2 but money is not as abundant as I'd like

 

Personal anecdotes to denote statistics is such a useless act, especially when it comes to something mechanical. You could spend hundreds of <your currency> and have a drive that dies in a matter of weeks. Meanwhile, you could buy the cheapest refurbished drive and it will last 10 years of constant use. Imperfections are unavoidable and sometimes you might just get really lucky with something cheaply made.

Of all brands I personally have come across, they have all failed at one point. When it comes to WD vs Seagate, you could argue one of them screws over their customers, depending on your perspective. In my experience, Seagate's SMART log is much more in-depth. That being said, you could say WD cheats by intentionally ignoring something that may otherwise cause long-term damage. On the other hand, you could say Seagate cheats by reporting about a non-issue "problem" and scare people into buying another drive.

Personally, I prefer the Seagate route and choose to ignore some of these "errors" or use the "faulty" drive for data that isn't crucial to me.

 

I'm sorry you fail that only 2.6 year of run time
I have some drive in that size over 40,000 runtime that 24 x 7 I even have a few smaller drive that are still run after 8.3 year of run time or all most 72,500 hours

 

This is a personal rambling, and I'm not a statistical report, but I'm never ever installing anything that has remotely to do with Seagate in my system. I had two disks, well ventilated, on rubber cushions, lightly used, using the latest available firmware, on an excellent PSU. They both crapped out in under three years. The first one made a weird spinup noise, and the other was just creating tens of thousands of bad sectors.

I now have a 3TB Toshiba which is a rebranded HGST, and a refurbished Hitachi Ultrastar with a proper SMART report. I somehow forsee them to behave better than the Seagate drives, although the Ultrastar is a really noisy drive.

 

1 of my ST2000DM001 died 1 month ago and today I unplugged it to throw it and now I don't have it anymore. It had 800 days of working time.
Still visible in Windows, but over 55000 reallocated sectors and over 10500 pending, usable only on first 14GB, after that it's full of bad sectors from every 4gb.
I had so much faith in Seagate, everything I have it's from Seagate.