Backup service Backblaze answers the question, “Which hard drive should I buy?”
Hard drive failure rates
Backup service Backblaze answers the question, “Which hard drive should I buy?”
This is very helpful, and I’m hoping they get more experience with Toshiba and Samsung drives over time. I also wonder how many other such companies use consumer-grade hard drives for this purpose.
We recently bought a Drobo 5D which is connected to one of our new 27″ iMac i7s via Thunderbolt. We populated it with five Seagate Barracuda 3TB 7200 rpm drives. This product gives us the peace of mind of being able to recover from a single drive failure by simply hot-swapping the bad drive with a new one.
Backblaze’s empirical data seems to indicate that Hitachi drives are significantly more reliable. So, on the occasion of our first drive failure, we’ll most likely find an Hitachi 4TB drive to replace it.
Planned obsolescence?
That’s a theoretical business practice which is said to exist in certain industries, but in the hard drive industry it wouldn’t work so well. One of the main selling points of a hard drive (which isn’t a major selling point for phones and computers) is that it should last. If it dies – especially in less than a couple years – the consumer is less likely to go back to that company. Planned obsolescence, in the world of hard drives, is not a great approach.
maybe…
however, the stats seems to show otherwise….
Would you explain for me how they do that? I don’t see it.
didn’t say that they “would” do that for sure. i just find it interesting (for years) why my HD would always crash every few years.
what does Seagates’ stats say? It fails every “x” years on average (higher failure rates). yet, they continue to be in business. WD is in the same boat.
now, these aren’t small companies…you would think that they should be thinking…”why” does our drives have such failure rates and “what” can we do to improve it?
however, if business is good…what motivation is there to change?
“however, if business is good…what motivation is there to change?”
Though I don’t think they plan obsolescence, this statement is the perfect summary of why Seagate’s products won’t be seeing any improvements in the near future.
willful ignorance?
are we to think Seagate and WD are run by ppl who could not think about these simple questions?
who knows…maybe there are other reasons. I just find it bizarre that I have more busted PCs because of HD failure than any of my Macs (none).
again…i’m just wondering because the stats provided finally made me realize that my plight wasn’t unique!
It’s not really theoretical when companies can be proven to deliberately do things that reduce the life expectancy of products
For example, some printers are literally programmed to stop working after a certain amount of use and to fix it, you simply have to reset a chip which luckily can be done with a simple scene package.
You’re intended to just throw the printer out and buy a new one, or send it in for repairs (which literally just involves resetting the chip).
Stuff like this is common, and often demonstrable.