[Discuss] Who makes the most reliable hard drives?

[Richard Pieri]

On 10/5/2014 10:54 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> It sounded like the stats don't include many Western Digital Red (NAS)
> drives, and no mention is made of Seagate NAS drives. Might they fair
> better? They also note that the Western Digital Green drives were not
> good for reliability, being negatively impacted by vibration and their
> constant power cycling (spinning down to save power).

Backblaze is near line storage: they fill up disks to capacity, spin 
them down, and leave them like that until user requests spin them up. 
You need to analyze their reports with that in mind because that's not 
what most of us would call a typical server environment.

WD Red disks are intended for front line storage: written and read more 
or less continuously. Very different kind of environment from Backblaze.

WD Green disks can be made to work sanely with a simple hdparm command:
   hdparm -q -S 250 /dev/sdX
This sets the idle power time out to five hours assuming I did the math 
right. Regardless of the math, the five WD Green disks in my home server 
don't go idle on me after issuing that command to each at boot time.

My experience is that storage density has more to do with reliability 
than manufacturer. The more densely packed the bits, the greater the 
chance that it will fail in production within a given span.

-- 
Rich P.