More Backblaze, 'Hitach', and Western Digital HGST ...
<< I do give Backblaze's reports some credence, but agree it should be kept in mind that their server environment does not reflect normal home usage. >>
Far from it. As for home use, back in 2013 "Backblaze said it would "stop buying Seagate LP 2TB drives and Western Digital Green 3TB drives, because they just don’t work in the company’s environment. Part of the problem, Backblaze says, is these drives are designed to spin down when not in use to save power. That’s a great feature for a home PC user, but in an industrial environment Backblaze says the drive would spin down only to spin back up a few minutes later. The end result being more wear and tear on the drive than it was designed for."
Like you, however, Robin Harris of ZDNet does give Backblaze's well composed Blog posts and reliability stats some credence ...
>> Trust Backblaze's drive reliability data?
Robin Harris
Storage Bits | ZDNet
January 25, 2014
zdnet.com
TweakTown's tacit defense of industry silence on drive reliability - and against the Backblaze report - fails on multiple levels. Here's why."
.... < Big snip> ...
So yes, as a consumer, I would look at Backblaze's results. If I were upgrading my arrays tomorrow, I'd make an extra effort to buy Hitachi per the Backblaze experience. What they found squares with what I've heard from insiders over the last 10 years. TweakTown repeatedly objected to the media attention this post got. If other players had already spoken it wouldn't be an issue, would it? I'll take Backblaze's info over nothing any day.
<snip rest: full text at link above> ... # # #
Of course when Robin wrote the above article in early 2014 Hitachi manufactured no HDDs or components for HDDS and Western Digital HGST branded drives manufactured by their San Jose subsidiary in Thailand, in China or Latin America as HGST, not 'Hitachi' and Toshiba manufactures their 3.5" drives formerly manufactured by Hitachi but that WDC spun off to them, in China.
Prior to now and ever since WD acquired Hitachi Clobal Services in early 2012 and although both WD and HGST companies have been kept primarily separate in compliance with a rather onerous MOFCOM (Chinese Ministry of Commerce) agreement, there's been a deliberate strategy to prevent products from both companies from overlapping. so WD has ended up selling mostly storage solutions for the consumer, OEM and SMB markets, with HGST focusing on the B2B and enterprise side.
One interesting aspect of the M&A story that completed the reduction of OEM HDD manufacturers which at one time or another numbered over 100, to 3, is that the full integration of HGST into WDC will finally complete this year and the upper ranks of WDC management from Stephen Milligan on down are dominated by former Hitach Global Services executives.
Two more relatively recent related articles (both from 'PCMag') are linked below ...
• The Best Online Backup Services of 2017: pcmag.com
• Backblaze Review: pcmag.com
Deskstar and the infamous Deathstar Trivia
Backblaze still uses a number of Deskstar models. Deskstar is the name of a product line of computer hard disk drives. It was originally announced by IBM in October 1994. The line was continued by Hitachi when in 2003 it bought IBM's hard disk drive division headquartered in San Jose, CA and renamed it Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. In 2012 Hitachi completed the sale of the Hitachi division to Western Digital who rebranded it as HGST and continued to design and manufacture Desktar models.
The IBM Deskstar 75GXP (six models ranging in capacity from 15 to 75 GB) became infamous circa 2001 for their reportedly high failure rates. This led to the drives being colloquially referred to as "Deathstars". Due to this, the drives were ranked 18th in PC World's " Worst Tech Products of All Time" feature in 2006. Note the simultaneously announced IBM Deskstar 40GV, a 5400 RPM version of the 7200 RPM 75GXP, did not suffer from the same reported high failure rate.
18. IBM Deskstar 75GXP (2000) Dead as a womp rat: The Deskstar 75GXP had one notable vulnerability--it tended to crash and die without warning,Fast, big, and highly unreliable, this 75GB hard drive was quickly dubbed the "Deathstar" for its habit of suddenly failing and taking all of your data with it. About a year after IBM released the Deskstar, users filed a class action suit, alleging that IBM had misled customers about its reliability. IBM denied all liability, but last June it agreed to pay $100 to Deskstar owners whose drives and data had departed their desks and gone on to a celestial reward. Well before that, IBM had washed its hands of the Deathstar, selling its hard drive division to Hitachi in 2002. Disclosure: I own one Hitachi (not WDC HGST) Deskstar which currently is happily running Win7 in a 64-bit 2nd gen i3 HP Pavilion p7-1110 2.00 purchased in late 2011 shortly after the Thailamd floods. It was my primary desktop from December 2011 until January 2016. While rather constantly powered even in its backup status the HDD does not spin 24/7.
Cheers, - Eric L. |
