Hard Drives: Reliability Rates

    I've gone to SSDs for my Macs and Image backups, but for storage it's still quite economical to do spinning drives.


    With that in mind, it's always good to know what is good and what is not.


    Backblaze, an iCloud storage backup service, has a lot of drives and does quarterly reviews of them now (used to be annual, but they must be growing)


    I love seeing that my prejudice against Seagate is warranted, and to learn what seems to hold up. They are moving up away from 3TB and 4TB up to 10TB and 12TB, so you can see whats coming down your pipeline one day!


    Here is their review:
    https://www.backblaze.com/blog…ve-failure-rates-q3-2017/


    And a link there goes to a person doing a more in-depth review, analyzing the date through a medical statistical lens (I always like to throw a big of geekiness Ingolf's way, haha):
    https://hackernoon.com/applyin…-drive-stats-36227cfd5372


    Anecdotally, over 70% of my Seagate drives have failed within 2 years since buying them around 2005. Western Digital has been pretty solid, failing after many years of use. I've not had a Hitachi or Toshiba go. All my SSD's so far are in working order (Cruze and OWC)


    I'm thinking after reading this report of getting an HGST Deskstar 4TB off Amazon. The issue with 3TB and up is that in the past I've had to format them differently to work on Windows. IDK if the new windows OS's (8 and up) are picky that way. But I usually format them NTSF and use Paragon to read them on my Macs. If anyone has better ways of doing this, please chime in. I'm out of the IT loop these days.

    Between the report Google put out many moons ago (heat related failure rates and SMART relationships) and the reports Backblaze has been posting, there is a wealth of information now available. It really is a fantastic benefit to the IT community having all this data available.

    Wow! That is impressive. Have't looked into the Time Capsule. Hmmm.


    I just use Carbon Clone app for making a bootable image. I've needed it twice, so it's nice to just swap a drive.
    Takes some re-authorization but I'm up and running rather quickly.

    I have six Macs through my house that are in constant use. All (except the laptop) have a mix of SSD and spinning drives.
    Each machine is cloned regularly and the two key Macs have both clones and Time Machine backups.


    Been using Macs since the Mac+ sometime in 1984/85 and it seems that the only drives I recall failing are Seagate, one just last week.

    Edited once, last by Gizmo ().

    Quote from DML

    For what it’s worth, maybe an idea to check which HDD’s are used in CCTV-recorders. These HDD’s are spinning 24/7, aprox. six to seven years.

    Had two of them fail ;)


    It's heat and cycling on/off that hurt drives.


    Basically I learned the hard way not to trust any of them and perhaps over-do the backups a bit, but they've saved my bacon several times. It's surprising how many folks don't even do a simple backup!

    I bought a used 2015 MBP off a video editor from FL and she said the reason she was selling is that the SSD drive that came with it is not the best for her job. Spinning drives are needed for video due to the constant over-writes. But for Audio, which largely uses non-destructive editing, SSD is perfect, she said.


    So I got a $2800 laptop for $1800, no complaints, and a lesson learned.


    When you see that Seagate has failure rates on some drives in the 18-30+% vs other drives in the 0.5-1.5% it's eye opening.


    The data has it's flaws as it's not based on a complete set of dead drives showing average life-span, but for "operational use" statistics, it's good enough to tell winners/losers for consumer use methinks.