We (as an industry) went through this bad batch madness with the IBM DeskStar 75GXP hard drives, which were affectionately referred to as "IBM Deathstar"[1].

It's rare, but it's not _that_ rare. You have to make the effort to understand why it failed.

I had a situation where I deployed Toshiba SLC SSDs (that were purchased over the course of several months) and a piece of software that synchronized to disk frequently, resulting in about 1GB of writes per hour.

After ~11 months in service, most of the drives died in the same 4 week period. We were astounded that everything failed so close to each other, including instances where both drives in a RAID 1 set were toast.

We did extensive troubleshooting between the failed servers and the remaining servers and figured out that write volume (by proxy of in-service date) was the one predictor of failure. Shortly thereafter, wear leveling and TRIM became things we sought out mentions of when spec'ing out hardware.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar

There was also more recently the case of the Seagate 7200.11, see my previous comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32053477

It usually takes something really bad happening before things get better.

Absolute best mechanical drives available until quite recently can be traced back to Deatstar. Deskstar 7K4000 were absolute best in class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar

Hitachi bought IBM hard drive business in 2003 for $2B. Sadly Its now owned by WD.

Of the ~20 assorted Deskstar and related Ultrastar drives of that vintage I've had in regular use over the past decade, exactly one has failed...because I dropped it.

HGST SAS SSDs (the ones that pair Intel NAND and Hitachi SAS controllers) have also been reliable performers in my home office experience, even without (RAID controller support for) UNMAP (SCSI "TRIM"). Incidentally, these now appear to be selling on eBay for more than I paid for them "lightly used" several years ago.

Surprisingly few HN submissions under either term:

IBM Deskstar: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

IBM Deathstar: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Back then people still used Slashdot:

Wondering if it's real... https://m.slashdot.org/story/20680

Years later, it's a widespread phenomenon: https://m.slashdot.org/story/43312

It was affectionately called the "click of death".

>But don't we all love them now because they support linux?

Ah, inventing an opinion to get angry about: some things never change.

Why would there be submissions? These drives predate HN.

HN occasionally discusses issues pre-dating itself.

... and the lifetime (deathtime?) award for the Deathstar only predated HN by a few months:

May 26, 2006: https://www.pcworld.com/article/535838/worst_products_ever.h...

October 9, 2006: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1

Memory would still have been reasonably green.

It does however come up in comments regularly. I know I've brought it up more than once, because I had a week long ordeal replacing all the drives in an array as they died one by one back in the day.

The deathstars were fantastic, they almost always failed on the outer edges of the platters.

So if you only formatted them (filesystem wise) out to capacity-2Gb they were a really cheap option at the time.

That’s a very different definition of fantastic than the one I use.

Once I'd worked it out - which was after the problems were public and therefore the price had utterly cratered - they were by far the cheapest storage per Gb available at the time (think "by a factor of two").

I would not have let a normal business user near one, but the developers I was supporting were most pleased about their larger than expected scratch disks for test databases and intermediate compilation artifacts.

Everything breaks. Things that at least break predictably make me happier than the alternative.