Looking For A Reliable Hard Drive? Buyers Beware – You Might Want To Avoid This Brand

[GachiMuchi]

Looking for a Reliable Hard Drive? Buyers Beware – You Might Want to Avoid THIS Brand

Are you a serial IT Show attendee? If you’ve never been for one, you should definitely go and check the next one out just for the experience. There will probably be thousands of eager shoppers (some of whom will be camping out overnight) waiting to breach the doors the way Genghis Khan and his hordes used to break through the gates of a city they were about to sack.
 
Sounds like plenty of fun really!

Chances are good that there will be plenty of Singaporeans looking to snatch up all sorts of electronics – including hard drives (don’t worry, I won’t ask what you’ll be filling those hard drives with).

But before you head down to the next IT Show to pick one or two up, you might want to think about a recent hard drive reliability study completed by BACKBLAZE, a company specialising in data backup.
Here’s what the BACKBLAZE study revealed about three popular hard drive brands:
 

One Brand Stood Out – And Not in a Good Way!

To make a long story short, BACKBLAZE purchased a ridiculous amount of consumer-grade hard drives (27,134 to be exact) for the purpose of testing the reliability of several prominent brands:

 

Hard Drive Brand - Number  Purchased - Average Life Span (Years)

Seagate                 - 12,765                         - 1.4

Hitachi                   - 12,956                         - 2.0

WD                         - 2,838                           - 2.5

Toshiba                  - 58                                - 0.7

Samsung               - 18                                - 3.7

The company evaluated hard drives from Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital, Toshiba and Samsung. However, the last two brands weren’t purchased in quantities large enough to get good statistics (I know – 27,000 hard drives can they can’t find a few thousand to evaluate Toshiba and Samsung?)

BACKBLAZE basically purchased the most “affordable” hard drives it could get its hands on, ran them through some intense stress tests and then put them to “work” in its “storage pods”.

Needless to say, this is a process that akin to “slave labour” in an electronic context – it’ll break the weakest and leave only the strongest.

Now, without further ado, here are the surprising (or unsurprising?) results of the BACKBLAZE’s 3-year study that evaluated more than 27,000 hard drives:

www.backblaze.com
 
Here’s another chart showing the survival rate of the study’s hard drives over a 3-year period:

www.backblaze.com
 
Does This Mean You Should Completely Avoid Seagate?

The answer to this question is “yes”, “no” and “that depends”.  In general, according to BACKBLAZE, “non-LP 7200 RPM drives have been consistently unreliable. Their failure rate is high, especially as they’re getting older.”

Yes – the average failure rate for Seagate hard drives sucks, with one model in particular, the Seagate Barracuda Green 1.5TB hard drive having an annual failure rate of 120% (and an average life span of 0.8 years – however, BACKBLAZE notes they were probably refurbished drives).

No – not all Seagate hard drives have incredibly high failure rates as the 4TB Seagate Desktop HDD.15 performed reasonably well, having a failure rate of only 3.8% (but keep in mind that’s 2X to 3X the failure rate of Hitachi hard drives!).

That depends – on how heavily you plan to utilise your hard drive. BACKBLAZE put these hard drives through plenty of wear and tear, so if you plan to use your hard drive moderately, Seagate hard drives will probably last much longer than was shown in the study.

The bottom line to this study is this – if you’re looking for a heavy duty hard drive, you’re better off with a Hitachi or Western Digital hard drive than a Seagate. They may be a little more expensive, but at least they’re proven to have a much lower failure rate over time.

What’s your experience with the hard drives in the article? Is the BACKBLAZE study right? Share your thoughts with us on Facebook! For even more useful information on everything personal finance, visit MoneySmart today!

Edited September 8, 2014 by GachiMuchi

[abang]

I have 2 pieces of 500GB Western Digital HD and I had used them for more than 2 years.

So far, they have NOT given me any problem.

 

From the report, it seems that the bigger the storage, the shorter its lifespan (?)

 

** Additional query: Heard and read so much about Chrome Cast... anyone used it?

[Guest Guest]

I have 10 Seagates. 3Tb and 1Tb and running happily and safely since 2009/2012. Dont believe all the shit you read.

[ctr77]

I think a lot of the hard disk drives tested were the older generation ones. The newer generation ones are *usually* more reliable.

But then again a lot depends on the manufacturing process. One batch of a certain model can have higher failure rates while other batches of the same model last much longer.

 

Ironically, HGST has probably the most infamous past when it comes to hard disk drives. Their hard drive division was acquired from IBM, and while it was under IBM back in 2001/2002, there were a series of drives where the entire model range experienced extremely high failure rates (reportedly 30+/40+%). This was due to a product defect which would cause the drive heads to crash and completely scrape the magnetic material off the platters, rendering them destroyed. This resulted in a class action lawsuit against IBM that forced them to sell their drive division, and that earned this particular drive model one of the top 20 spots in the list of the "Worst Tech Products Of All Time". However IBM/HGST drives of other models run just fine and last as long as drives of other manufacturers.

 

Anyway no one is going to have that sort of utilisation level as what the people in the study did. It would take probably more than 20 or 30 years of daily consumer use to equal 1 year of stress testing in their lab.

[noobody]

i'll just point out that i have been using a seagate 500gb for the last 5 years 

 

toshiba is shit for me connection comes lose all the time 

 

western digital is a nono they take forever to respond 

 

just got a new samsung to replace my western digital its pretty good so far. 

also bought a new seagate because the old one died after 5 years loving it.