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[Discuss] Who makes the most reliable hard drives?
- Subject: [Discuss] Who makes the most reliable hard drives?
- From: tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)
- Date: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 22:54:25 -0400
An article from last January that summarizes research done by backup service Backblaze: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175089-who-makes-the-most-reliable-hard-drives (I've ran across this before, but interesting enough that it is worth being reminded of.) The nutshell summary is that Backblaze found Hitachi drives to be most reliable, and if they were consistently price competitive, they'd only buy Hitachi drives. They're followed closely by Western Digital, with Seagate a more distant 3rd. 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). I was just looking at 3 TB NAS drives from the 3 manufacturers. WD and Seagate are both priced around $120. The Hitachi around $150. Is a $30 premium worth reducing the failure rate from ~3% down to ~1%? For any sort of low-volume business use, definitely. For home use? Maybe. I hear WD Red (NAS) drives have become popular as desktop drives due to their cooler operating temperatures, but I've also heard cautions that these drives are not a good choice if not used in a redundant array. Their firmware is optimized to give up quickly when read errors occur, with the assumption that the RAID controller can then get the data from another drive. If used solo, you're more apt to encounter read errors because of this. -Tom -- Tom Metro The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA "Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting." http://www.theperlshop.com/
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