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Hard Drive Brand Reliability Data

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xtabber:
Backblaze has published updated hard drive reliability data through the first quarter of 2016.  Australian computational biologist Ross Lazarus has updated his survival analysis to include the 2016 data.

As before, HGST comes out by far the best and Seagate the worst.

But things are not quite that simple. Seagate's reliability has improved since Backblaze started publishing this in 2013 and Western Digital's declining, placing them below Seagate for newer drives.  They also have far more Seagate drives than any others and are now buying fewer WD and Toshiba drives -- not because of reliability, but because they can buy Seagates cheaply while WD and Toshiba are hard to find in the bulk quantities they need.

On top of that, WD bought HGST from Hitachi in 2012 and divested HGST's manufacturing facilities by selling some of them to Toshiba.

So which drive should you purchase if you are looking for reliability?   Quien sabe?

Deozaan:
I recently purchased a WD Black 5TB HDD, mostly because it comes with a 5 year warranty, whereas most other drives have (IIRC) 2 year (or less) warranties.

I don't know if they're really more reliable than any other drive, but just the fact that they're confident enough in them to warranty them for 5 years when other companies only do 2 years was enough to convince me that it was worth the extra money.

MilesAhead:
I recently purchased a WD Black 5TB HDD
-Deozaan (May 18, 2016, 05:38 PM)
--- End quote ---

Obliquely on topic perhaps.. but I am curious how you partition and use the 5 TB and what OS etc..  I had a few WD Blacks but I stopped at the 1 TB capacity.  That was the sweet spot for the online discount house I used to purchase storage.  I have seen some Windows people have weird things happen with storage larger than 2 TB.  That is why I am curious.

Deozaan:
It's just one massive 5 TB (4.54 TB formatted space) partition on Windows 10. It's my main data drive. My Documents, downloads, disc images, videos, games, music, virtual machines, source code repositories, etc., all go on this drive. And until recently even my Temp directory was on this drive. But now I have a 6GB RAMDisk for that.

I had reason to believe that my 2TB drive was slowly dying, so I replaced it with the 5TB drive. And by replaced it, I mean I added in the 5TB drive that I now use for the same purpose I used my 2TB drive, and the 2TB drive is now my "backup" drive.

Hard Drive Brand Reliability Data

I haven't had any problems with the large partition. But I'm running a 64-bit OS and haven't attempted any older, <32-bit software on it.

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