2018 Hard Drive Reliability Study - Back Blaze

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Back Blaze posted their annual report on drive failures. They now have 5 years of failure data.
CLICK HERE FOR REPORT

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Yeah and dare I say who the dog seems to be? (At least for that one model)
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Originally Posted by Cujet
Wait, isn't HGST no more? I think they were Hitachi and now Western Digital. But I'd have to look that up.

Yes.

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HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) was a manufacturer of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services.

It was initially a subsidiary of Hitachi, formed through its acquisition of IBM's disk drive business. It was acquired by Western Digital in 2012, but required to operate autonomously from the remainder of the company due to conditions imposed by Chinese regulators. However, in October 2015, Chinese regulators permitted Western Digital to begin wider integration of HGST into its main business. By 2018, the HGST brand had been phased out, with its remaining products now marketed under the Western Digital name.


Assuming they are correct with their information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST
 
the drive cost is generally low but install can be $$$. changing one varies by machine + bigger thicker heavier laptops are much easier, smaller units are a pain, everything is tighter. never had anything but laptops so i can't say about others.then you need approval to reload the operating system. my first dell included back up CD's but no more!
 
It seems like Western Digital is slowing migrating their "enterprise" hard drive line to the HGST platform, and the consumer/media(like set-top and security DVRs) to the WD platform and with their purchase of SanDisk, their SSD program will be based off that.

I've seen more Seagates die than WDs, but years ago Fujitsus dropped like flies.
 
Originally Posted by nthach
It seems like Western Digital is slowing migrating their "enterprise" hard drive line to the HGST platform, and the consumer/media(like set-top and security DVRs) to the WD platform and with their purchase of SanDisk, their SSD program will be based off that.

I've seen more Seagates die than WDs, but years ago Fujitsus dropped like flies.


Your experience mirrors mine. The dead drives I have shot have by and large all been Seagate. I also recall vividly the Fujitsu hard drive failure fiasco, and of course there was the IBM "DeathStar" debacle as well
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I was building PC's at the time of the Fujitsu reliability issues and they had a repair center close to where I was living. It seemed like I would take cases of drives there weekly but their pricing at the time couldn't be beat. I guess that is why.
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I also recall them making a weird noise at idle all the time like a grinding. I think one of their tech's told me it was the thermal expansion of the platters that caused it to have the drive recheck allocations or something. (It was over 20 years ago so I don't really remember)

Seagates were super reliable for me up until the 1990's and then they seemed to steadily go down hill from there based on my experiences with them.

I always had great luck with WD's except some of their Caviar series of drives. These seemed to be hit/miss depending on the model. WD Black series have been super reliable for me.

I miss Quantum drives. Those were some really reliable 3.5". Remember their Big-Foot 5.25" drives? What were they thinking?
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IIRC, the Fujitsu failures were around 2001. Deathstar failures were maybe 2002?

It was the 5,400RPM 40GB Fujitsu that pooped the bed, IIRC, the more expensive 7,200RPM model, which seemed physically identical, didn't experience failure, or if it did, it certainly wasn't what appeared to be the absolute failure guarantee that was the case with the 5,400RPM drive.

I actually found an old Quantum bigfoot the other day in my basement. God they were awful! Huge, slow.....but cheap. And that's why they sold.
 
I seem to recall it was the 20gb, 30gb and 40gb drives from Fujitsu and yes all 5400 rpm.

I guess that makes sense - Bigfoot.
 
Originally Posted by StevieC
I seem to recall it was the 20gb, 30gb and 40gb drives from Fujitsu and yes all 5400 rpm.

I guess that makes sense - Bigfoot.


I remember most of the returns being the 40's, but I'd expect that all of them in that family in that rotational speed were potentially affected. The 7,200RPM had a different board IIRC
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We did find that mounting the drives sideways instead of traditional horizontal seemed to make a difference but that could just have been noise in the failure rates.
 
Interesting... Maybe that's why the vertically mounted ones seemed to last longer than the horizontally mounted ones. We assumed it was the mechanics of the drive but it looks like from this thread it was the controller chips.

Thanks.
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WD has combined their SanDisk, HGST, WD, STEC, Fuzion IO, etc SSD teams together and manage them by the enterprise / consumer.

HD wise they are manufactured the same way but some regulation force them to separate WDC and HGST to avoid monopoly.

I was at Seagate right before their reliability went down the toilet, the story I was told was WDC bought the head company (I think it was called Read Rite), and Seagate decided not to buy from a competitor and build their own, and didn't do too well.

The newer Seagate from what I heard is actually ok.
 
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From what I've read, when Seagate bought out Conner, that's when they started to slide downhill. The irony was that Nils Conner was a former Seagate engineer, and their drive design was simple - the moving parts on a aluminum plate with a stamped steel cover that was cheaper to build.

Quantum from what I remember as a kid were all made in Japan by Panasonic(Matsushita back then).
 
I had a Matsushita single speed CD drive in my 386 and it was rock solid reliable when other CD drives were not. It was slow though and needed its own propritary interface card and you couldn't use the Sound Blaster cards because it wanted an address of 330 and the SB cards I think at the time would only do 220/240. I'm dating myself.
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Connor were decent drives, usually found in economy models. Maxtor made some decent drives until they started getting into the bigger stuff before they were about to go bankrupt and before DSP then Seagate gobbled them up in 2006.
 
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Originally Posted by nthach
From what I've read, when Seagate bought out Conner, that's when they started to slide downhill. The irony was that Nils Conner was a former Seagate engineer, and their drive design was simple - the moving parts on a aluminum plate with a stamped steel cover that was cheaper to build.

Quantum from what I remember as a kid were all made in Japan by Panasonic(Matsushita back then).


Not exactly, 7200.7 was real good and way after Seagate bought Conner. I'm still using mine from 2003 on my daily rig.
 
I worked on parts for Seagate and WD quite some time ago...dealing with Seagate was generally pretty straightforward, not so much with WD. This was so long ago that it's unlikely that more than a few of the same people are still at either company, particularly the senior managers....

When you look into how a hard drive works, it's pretty incredible that the things actually function. I remember one of the mechanical guys talking about how closely the R/W heads flew over the platters and how they would fuse together if they actually touched. SSD is a piece of cake by comparison, excepting the miniscule feature sizes involved...
 
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