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Hard Drive Brand Reliability Data

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IainB:
Very interesting. Not often one sees hard data about hard drive failure-rates.
One needs to be careful with these statistics. For example, whilst the brand name is shown , the failure is relevant to that brand only by the given drive type/size within that brand name, and YMMV as these failures presumably occurred under operating conditions that might not correspond to one's own peculiar operating conditions.

I recall another post in a website a while back that also had data to back up the relatively low incidence of Western Digital drive failure as compared to Seagate.
It may be that the pattern is - or would be -  noticeable across the range of brands and sizes, but the data has not been aggregated sufficiently or published for us to be able to come up with some general rule of thumb. If we did have that form of data, it would make the market more perfect (in the economic sense) and there could well be a lot of newly-educated consumers voting with their feet.

This might even be considered by some as being a good reason for suppressing the publication of such data.

mouser:
Some comments to take note of from the backblaze blog:

The drives that just don’t work in our environment are Western Digital Green 3TB drives and Seagate LP (low power) 2TB drives. Both of these drives start accumulating errors as soon as they are put into production. We think this is related to vibration. The drives do somewhat better in the new low-vibration Backblaze Storage Pod, but still not well enough.

These drives are designed to be energy-efficient, and spin down aggressively when not in use. In the Backblaze environment, they spin down frequently, and then spin right back up. We think that this causes a lot of wear on the drive.
--- End quote ---

mouser:
From slashdot:

"A recent study of hard drive reliability by Backblaze was deeply flawed, according to Henry Newman, a longtime HPC storage consultant. Writing in Enterprise Storage Forum, Newman notes that the tested Seagate drives that had a high failure rate were either very old or had known issues. The study also failed to address manufacturer's specifications, drive burn-in and data reliability, among other issues. 'The oldest drive in the list is the Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drive from 2006. A drive that is almost 8 years old! Since it is well known in study after study that disk drives last about 5 years and no other drive is that old, I find it pretty disingenuous to leave out that information. Add to this that the Seagate 1.5 TB has a well-known problem that Seagate publicly admitted to, it is no surprise that these old drives are failing.'"

nosh:
I've hardly ever used drives other than Seagate and I've yet to encounter one that flaked out in the first few years of use.
OTOH, I've used a handful of WD drives and around half of them had problems a lot earlier than I was accustomed to.
Maybe it's a regional thing? More likely, just dumb luck.

40hz:
I've hardly ever used drives other than Seagate and I've yet to encounter one that flaked out in the first few years of use.
OTOH, I've used a handful of WD drives and around half of them had problems a lot earlier than I was accustomed to.
Maybe it's a regional thing? More likely, just dumb luck.
-nosh (January 30, 2014, 02:28 AM)
--- End quote ---

I think it probably has as much to do with the manufacturing batch and model as it does with the brand for consumer drives. These low-cost/high-capacity drives aren't tested all that extensively. And the test sample size is kept smaller than for 'enterprise' drives in order to keep the production costs down. Far cheaper for a manufacturer to allow for a higher failure rate and simply replace drives under warranty, than it is to more thoroughly QC all the drives in a production run.

Consumer drives also have a greater likelihood of being 'accidentally' manhandled in retail shipment and storage. That may not be enough to cause a drive to fail right out of the box. But it can lead to premature failure. I've personally heard former Big Box and office store employees boast about slamming electronics around whenever The Boss wasn't looking. And there are plenty of YouTube videos of postal and other delivery drivers slam dunking boxes marked "fragile" on porches to not take that possibility into account either.

At the end of the day, I think a drive just lives as long as it does. (Much like us!) You can do some things to up the likelihood of a long productive life. But there are no guarantees. Only trends and probabilities.
 8)

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