Posted on Wednesday, February 17 2016 @ 14:39 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Storage service Backblaze published a new hard disk reliability review. In previous editions, the company talked about high failure rates of Seagate's 3TB HDDs, but now the firm switched to 4TB HDDs and noticed Seagate's 4TB units have relatively normal failure rates. You can read the full report
over here.
All of the 4TB drives have acceptable failure rates, but we’ve purchased primarily Seagate drives. Why? The HGST 4TB drives, while showing exceptionally low failure rates, are no longer available having been replaced with higher priced, higher performing models. The readily available and highly competitive price of the Seagate 4TB drives, along with their solid performance and respectable failure rates, have made them our drive of choice.
A relevant observation from our Operations team on the Seagate drives is that they generally signal their impending failure via their SMART stats. Since we monitor several SMART stats, we are often warned of trouble before a pending failure and can take appropriate action. Drive failures from the other manufacturers appear to be less predictable via SMART stats.
