To: SI Ron (Crazy Music Man) who wrote (93674 ) 6/24/2016 7:37:03 PM From: Eric L Respond to Horses Mouths (in re Hitachi GST, WD's HGST, and Backblaze) ... The assets [of the acquisition completed March 2012] included the owned and leased 2.9 million square foot San Jose, CA HGST headquarters for administration, product development, R&D, marketing and sales, as well as the manufacturing complex where head wafers, heads, and media for HGST HDDs are produced. " was paraphrased from the Western Digital annual report and 10Q (Properties) which you can download from the Investor Relations section of their website. HGST's drives have long stood out as the most reliable, and that trend continues. Their failure rate is remarkably low; even after three years in service, the 3TB and 4TB units have annualized failure rates of just 0.81 percent and 1.03 percent, respectively. " The 2TB units, which last quarter were already on average more than 5 years old, have seen a small increase in failure rate—1.57 percent, compared to 1.15 percent a year ago—but still show extraordinary reliability considering their age. "After some bad experiences with certain models and annualized failure rates in some cases approaching 30 percent, Seagate's performance is also solid. Backblaze's most common disk type is a 4TB Seagate unit, with nearly 35,000 of the drives in use, and those are demonstrating at a failure rate of 2.90 percent. "backblaze.com ) to the source publication Peter links and which I linked several posts back on this board. In that post here to J.F. Sebastian I stated: "It's important to understand why the use case of the budget online storage company [Backblaze] is so radically different from that of virtually anyone that contributes regularly to this board or follows it and why there are so few Western Digital drives (as opposed to Western Digital manufactured HGST drives) spinning 24/7 in their 45 to 60 unit storage pods for multiplexed 3.5" SATA internal drives. Likewise why they have so many Seagates and still have such a large population of legacy Hitachi manufactured SATAS (now lumped with WD HGST SATAs) many of which were procured (farmed) before the 2011 Thailand floods when high volumes of drives (or even small volumes) were extremely difficult to procure at a reasonable price. " "Hitachi has the lowest failure rate of hard drives. It [the links to two articles you provided] didn't state in the article. I'm guessing it's both internal and external. " the 1st article you linked by Ian Paul specifies the Hitachi models Backblaze is using which are legacy 3.5" SATA Deskstar internals running 24/7 in Backblaze designed 45 unit storage pods and Ian pointed out: Backblaze said it will 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. ... Then there’s cost. The only thing holding Backblaze back from going with all Hitachi drives was the price, which was one reason why the company sticks with Seagate drives. Backblaze's earlier study showed that hard drives are actually pretty reliable overall over a four-year stretch, even in a server farm. And hey, a number of individual Seagate models actually had a longer average age than Hitachi products! Maybe the lesson from Backblaze’s data is that choosing the right hard drive is all about tradeoffs. (Isn't it always?) Nevertheless, it’s an interesting look at the reliability of many internal hard drives you might be considering for your next PC.
