I think "times have changed" can be generalized into "times will change".

My experience has been that any rule about "brand X is the best" or "brand Y is the worst" only lasts for a short time--each hard drive technology "generation" seems to reshuffle the reliability matrix. Whoever was on top in 2009 has almost no bearing on who's on top in 2014, or who will be in 2019.

At some point, Hitachi Diskstars were referred to as "Death Stars", and that was all I knew about disk reliability. It is great to have some real information.

Dell, Google, and Amazon can never write reports like this because the vendor relationship is important. Because these guys have no relationship and are buying consumer disks, the world finally gets brand level reliability reports. Kudos to Backblaze.

> Dell, Google, and Amazon can never write reports like this because the vendor relationship is important. Because these guys have no relationship and are buying consumer disks, the world finally gets brand level reliability reports. Kudos to Backblaze.

Dell maybe, but Google and Amazon consider what goes on in their data centers to be part of their secret sauce. It doesn't have to do with vendor relationships, it has to do with a competitive edge. Google and Amazon will drop a vendor without a second thought if it's even slightly more advantageous.

Death Stars were never applied to the drives as Hitachi Drives, but when they were still branded as IBM drives. Namely the 75GXP model era.

I think that was one IBM model way before Hitachi acquired that division from Big Blue; they've otherwise been pretty good.

If I remember correctly they didn't name names, but Google did publish a very useful paper on their experiences with disks. The two big takeaways were that in only half the disks the self testing signaled a future failure, and manufactures seemed to have solved heat problems.

I had four of the three Death Stars I bought fail (yes one of the replacements failed too). 133% failure rate is quite an achievement. They were great drives when they worked.

Related: Intel's SSD is the only SSD I've ever lost data with. It happened due to a power outage that bricked the drive, and the only reason it happened was because of a flaw in their firmware, not their drive, which they hushed up. I was very surprised because Intel had the reputation of being the best SSD at the time. (It was the 300-something series.)

My Kingston SSD is already paying its aging tax.

"paying its aging tax" ?

I'm so ashamed right now. I've been recommending Seagates to everybody who asked for years without updating my fundaments...

Don't be ashamed: for a pretty long time Seagates really were very reliable, the 7200.9 and 10 series were a staple in my systems throughout the last couple years. Seagates also used to have a 5 year warranty period. I'm actually thankful that the Seagates I've bought more recently tend to suffer from crib death: better it dies immediately rather than die once I've put my trust in it.

As others have said though, these things tend to go in cycles. One manu. gets a bunch of bum drives, people react and they start cracking the whip on QC. I think it's also a product of what we're asking of our drives today: SSDs are eating away at the low end so their only recourse is to pack more and more data into smaller and smaller spaces leading to a greater reliance on error correction.

I will say though, the BackBlaze report led me to try out HGST drives for the first time and I've been overwhelmingly satisfied with them.

That said, will that trend continue? I guess we'll see when the 2015 report comes out.

Yev from Backblaze here -> No reason to be ashamed! Truth is we still buy Seagates! Most likely they will work well enough in a home environment. All drives fail eventually. If you can get 3-4 years out of one, that's great!

Yes but usually people come to me because I'm the tech guy and they expect something better then "Take whatever you want. They'll all make it through the first 3-4 years" ;)

The worst part of it is: my own HDs are all Seagates and I use them longer then that...

I don't know if I was just lucky or what, but I've always had far worse experiences with Seagates than WDs.

I got into building PCs on the side in about '96 or so and did break/fix support through college - it always seemed (I didn't keep records - I can't quantify) that Seagates accounted for more than their share of the "it won't start and is making a clicking noise" cases. So much so, that I have recommended against Seagates and towards WDs for as long as I can remember (15+yrs).

I've only had a small amount of direct experience with Hitachi drives, so I can't speak to them too much.. Though I do have a Hitachi in an enclosure that's been kicking around since about 2004, so I guess that says something...

I choose drive brands almost exclusively based on warranty duration. After Seagate bought Maxtor, they started lowering warranties on all of their drives. The results, as you can see, were predictable.

Their "enterprise" disks (except for Terascale HDD/Constellation CS models) apparently still have 5 year warranties†, and I just had to exchange a big Constellation drive, so I can attest their warranty service is still very good.

†They apparently dropped this to 3 years for the first 6 months of 2012 at least for the big drives who's technology base is consumer ... I suspect that change was not well received.

Unfortunately, you are generally correct that we've seen a race to the bottom.

regressing warranty length against average time to failure in this data set would be interesting...!

They bought Maxtor and kept the crappy Chinese plants. Interestingly they don't sell the Chinese 3.5" drives at Costco (where they can easily get returned) right now...

I used to love Seagate. Then I got bit by the 7200.11 firmware problems, which was one of the worst hard drive experiences I've ever had. Never again.

The 7200.11 debacle! It was unbelievable that it happened- as far as I remember, Seagate was the leader in reliability before then, I had created five or six RAIDs with Seagate drives with 100% reliability.

But when they released the 7200.11 versions....ALL 7200.11 models would spin down after idle for X minutes and then start clicking...the data was still intact, but for the drive to work again you had to pull the power.

I unfortunately built an eight drive RAID5 with these drives before the issue was know, which made it very difficult for me to diagnose the issue. (All drives seemed perfectly fine when powered and working for the first 5-10 minutes or whenever they were in use, but as soon as a single drive of the RAID idled, the RAID5 acted like a drive was bad).

I still have a box with eight 1TB Seagate 7200.11 drives that I never updated. I have never bought another Seagate drive for RAID since, always WD or Hitachi.

Yup. I had built a gaming/workstation desktop using 2x 7200.11's in RAID-0. It started acting up, at a lan party of all things, which made me suspect the RAID controller on the motherboard, especially after using the drives separately seemed to work ok. But then one of the drives died and then the other, both at pretty much the least convenient moments possible.

Unfortunately, there are so few choice now. :-(