Hard drive reliability

[Rob Lewis]

Interesting report from backup company Backblaze on their experience with various brands/models of hard drives. 

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/

Short version: Hitachi drives (the former IBM drive operation, now owned by Western Digital) seem to be the real reliability stars (I guess they’ve improved since their early Deskstar models were affectionately known as “Deathstars”). Some of Seagate’s 1.5TB and 3.0TB models seem to be particularly bad. 

So-called “enterprise” drives, that typically cost more than twice as much as ordinary drives, are no better in reliability, in fact they’re a bit worse. As I’ve suspected, the extra money basically buys you an extended warranty (prompting my rant that people don’t want drives with long warranties—we want drives that don’t break!). I wouldn’t be surprised if the drives were identical internally. 

Read the full post for the various caveats. 
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