Failure Rate Analysis - Best 10Tb+ hard drives: Seagate, Western Digital or Toshiba?

[@PrincipalAudio]

If it's a big enough sample to provide a chart that shows high enough resolution data, it's big enough for me to make a decision off. If it's a sample size of, say, 5 disks, then the resolution just won't be there. I'd say the data you're presenting here is more than enough for people to make a valid decision on. Thanks so much for posting it and the hard work you've done.

[@sometechguy]

Appreciate the feedback and comment. 😊

[@kubastachu9860]

The data doesn't show anything new to the industry: Seagate always fails the most.

[@MrAkaacer]

@@kubastachu9860 Always good to have confirmation :).

[@nicks3608]

@@kubastachu9860 looking to buy my first hdd in 16 years... oh how some things never change.

[@suryaj4928]

TL DR; WD >> HGST >> Toshiba >> Seagate

[@ivangutowski]

Best to worst I presume

[@tiitulitii]

@@ivangutowski At home, WDs used to be so bad that I decided never buy them again. I shall now reconsider.

[@blockman426]

HGST was actually bought out by western digital in 2012 and was fully transitioned to the wd brand by 2018, so newer HGST drives are just wd drives I believe

[@saganandroid4175]

Weird. WD are the only brands I ever had die!

[@saganandroid4175]

@@tiitulitii Yeah WD was horrible right up to 2022 at least.

[@dquiznoes]

The amount data presented to make these conclusions is great and very in-depth! thank you for your work!

[@sometechguy]

Thank you, I appreciate this! The data from Backblaze is fantastic and contains a lot of detail and a huge volume of stats, its over 410 million rows, each with around 35 columns of good usable data, with many more that isn't so useful. They also did a great job in keeping the data pretty clean, I worked with really dirty datasets before that require a great deal of clean up but the BB data is highly consistent. But it still takes a lot of work to extract the trend data and aggregate it up so you can get the AFR stats. Glad you found it useful.

[@LG-ff8gb]

@@sometechguydoes Backblaze also use SSDs? This is a really interesting and informative video. would be awesome to see one comparing various SSDs and how each company ranks differently in drive performance ( like company ranking 1st in ssd and last in hdd)

[@sometechguy]

@@LG-ff8gb Appreciate it! Blackblaze do use SSD's and that info is in the data. Unfortunately, they don't seem to use them extensively and its only around 3,200 drives with most of them being quite small capacity Seagate Barracuda drives, only 280 or so are above 500Gb. So not such a useful dataset. I am also guessing they are mostly boot drives, but it would be a guess.

[@jasont80]

This is one of the greatest datasets in all of technology, as it allows our purchase decisions to pressure vendors to build more dependable drives!!!

[@sometechguy]

Yes! I believe this is why Backblaze publish it and why others should to. I am sure it’s leverage over the hard disk suppliers to do the right thing by them also. Backblaze also do a great job at keeping the dataset relatively clean. It didn’t require too much clean up to ensure consistency.

[@jasont80]

@@sometechguy I wonder if we could write an app to monitor drives in Win/Linux machines around the world? That could really grow this dataset. You'd just have to trust the use to determine is a drive failed vs removed. Could work. Would be fairly easy to write.

[@alexclifford2485]

This is outstanding analysis. Thank you. Am impressed with my WD and HGST drives so far

[@sometechguy]

Thank you, appreciate the feedback and the likes on this comment. Glad people found this valuable. 🥳

[@kevinlsims7330]

I Have A WD 500 GB Drive That I Use As A Temp Drive To Record TV To! I Bought It At Goodwill Over 10 Years Ago For $1! This Thing Has lasted Longer Than Any Other Drive I Have Owned And Stays Powered Up 24x7 The Entire Time I Have Owned It!! I Expect To Hear The Click Of Death Any day But it just Keeps on Spinning!

[@yeeaahBUDDY]

@@kevinlsims7330 curious how long it took you to write that comment with all the unnecessary capitalization

[@LatitudeSky]

WD used be my worst nightmare. I had a lot of their 80GB drives and every single one failed. The warranty replacements failed. It was a disaster. But flash forward 15 years or whatever it is and I ended up running WD NVME in everything and now the 10TB HGST HE drives in my NAS. Mostly because they absorbed Hitachi, my old go-to. But I've been quite happy with current NVME and spinning drives and SanDisk for memory cards. Samsung, Crucial, and Silicon Power have all let me down. Would never use those again. Hynix has been good to me.

[@kevinlsims7330]

@@LatitudeSky I had Several 3TB Toshiba Drives That FAILED! The WD 4TB Drives Were Way better! I Am Now Running Refurbished 12TB Seagate Exos 16 Enterprise Drives! I Have 3X12TB and 3X14TB For My OS I Use Sabrient Rocket 1TB And WD Black 1TB NVME Drives! On My retro Dell XPS 410 I Run Kingston SSD NOW 128GB's It's Over 10 Years Old Now! The XPS Is From 2007!

[@anja2440]

I watched 3 of your movies. I like the analysis, and the visual stats about the performance of the drives. You put in a lot of effort visualizing the data, which is most appreciated. It comes in handy to change the WD drives in my synolgy NAS, thanks.

[@sometechguy]

Thank you for the positive feedback. When it comes to failure data, especially comparing many devices I think its really hard to get a good picture of this without visualizations, as there are so many variables to include. It did take some time to put together, and structuring the data also takes time, so I really appreciate the comment that it was useful.

[@Pulverrostmannen]

I have a Seagate Hard drive that been running for more than 139000 Hours, that's almost 16 years of 24/7 and it is still going, it just recently re-mapped for the first time 8 sectors to spare ones but so far nothing else gone. it have load/unload the heads 5 million times so far

[@sometechguy]

That's impressive, which model is it? 😎

[@Pulverrostmannen]

@@sometechguy ST96812AS 60GB 2,5” I actually think when it comes to 2,5” drives Seagate been the generally best. And WD when it comes to 3,5”. Worst ever is Hitatchi Travelstar for 2,5. And the IBM Deathstar lol. I had very bad luck with drives in general but I also seen very long lived ones in my days too

[@Helios.vfx.]

Hi, how do you remap the drive?

[@Pulverrostmannen]

@@Helios.vfx. Typically a normal drive will automatically re-map sectors when needed by itself through its built in Smart function. You can monitor this using software such as Gsmart control and Crystaldiskinfo. You can manually do a sector scan of a drive and search for bad sectors using Gsmart control or Windows/programs to check the drive for problems before they eventually get big enough to cause major problems. When a drive is getting worn out and it re-map a lot of sectors or mark many as problematic it is a sign of eminent failure and you should replace the drive. For example: reallocated sector count. This is the value of successful remaps that the hard drive done for you both on mechanical and SSDs. A value higher than 0 is a sign of age or increasing risk of failure. Current pending sector count, this value indicates the drive have problems with sectors but it is waiting for a suitable time to re-map it or check again. It may also be that it is failing to do a re-map of these sectors hence it is a pending problematic sector. Increasing values here have a big chance of damaged data as data is often still stored in these inaccessible sectors. Uncorrectable sector count. A value here indicates the drive have problems with sectors and could not correct them with the built in smart. This is often caused by locked data due to file systems on the drive. Your data is at eminent risk of failure as your drive cannot correct damaged sectors. If your drive have all the 3 combined in higher values you can be assured you have to backup immediately because your data is at maximum risk of complete failure. Monitoring a drives Smart is a very good thing to do at all times as all hard drives are constantly keeping track of their own health at all times

[@sanquinteros]

dude, whats the model?

[@Collectible_Andy]

Building a nas and found your channel through this video. Enjoyed it enough to subscribe. Thanks for the info!

[@sometechguy]

Thank you and welcome. Small but growing quickly! Appreciate the support.

[@TheZettaze]

Thanks for making this data much more understandable, where I've seen other channels make a mess of this, subbed!

[@sometechguy]

And thank you for the comment and feedback. Glad I did a reasonable job and thanks for the sub!

[@davidbon4707]

Thanks for all your work in doing this, much appreciated.

[@sometechguy]

Glad you enjoy it! Thank you

[@skibik3r]

Fantastic data presentation, the truth is always in the numbers!! I've got about 13k hours on my 16tb X16 drives in my nas, I'm happy to see the data shows they are quality drives!

[@MorningNapalm]

Through the years, my experience has been that Seagates are hit and miss, and WD drives have generally been very reliable. I did have a single WD which failed early, but the rest have been solid. Your videos reinforces these impressions with hard data. Thank you.

[@fragdq]

Every WD I ever got (3) failed in less than 1 year. At home at least. Samsung hdds never failed me once, and Seagate bought Samsungs hard disk drive business in like 2011?

[@CD-vb9fi]

I can't tell you how much information like this is appreciated! It cuts through all the mud. People can make genuinely informed decisions on storage!

[@sometechguy]

Thank you, appreciate the comment and glad it was valuable. 😃

[@gravidar]

When you're buying 10s of thousands of drives I guess price makes a huge difference. I, however, am looking at my home NAS with 2/4 failed Seagate drives after 2 years :( I know, not enterprise stuff but think I'll pay a little more and go back to WD (I went Seagate IronWolf for a capacity upgrade). Really helpful stuff, thank you!

[@sometechguy]

I think this is a good takeaway.

[@TsunaXZ]

This scared me a bit, I got 2x12tb Ironwolfs in my nas rn. I was planning to add 2 more of the same model...

[@csedu3467]

Thank you sir! This is what i was searching. It would be great to find more video like this.

[@paranoidzkitszo]

Great analysis...basically, "if contracted at a company you hate, make sure it's all Seagate!". 10-4-73

[@KarlRock]

Thank God the dude at the store sold me WD then ☺️ I didn’t know what brand to choose.

[@LumpiDeluxe]

In 7 years using 5 Seagate 4 TB Iron drives in my Synology NAS, one of the five cashed after 3 years and 4 months with bad sectors - shorts outsite the 3 years warrenty. One time after 7 years a drive power off (hang up), but can be reinstalled to the RAID again without an other fail. But in the future I switch to Toshiba, because all Toshiba drives have 5 years warranty.

[@sometechguy]

Thanks for sharing your experiences. The warranty will depend on the drive class, and has varied over time. All the manufacturers appear to offer 5 years warranty currently on current enterprise class disks, but NAS class disks, surveillance and desktop vary. For example the Toshiba S300 Surveillance Drives have a 3 year warranty, and their desktop P300 have 2 year limited warranty currently based on their datasheets. I think generally you will find similar warranties between them on competitive products.

[@dociekania]

Seagate ... Advice from 25+ years of experience is: avoid Seagate.

[@dociekania]

Mechanical storage now starts from 4TB up. Personaly I use Adata 8200 pro as main disk, Cruical MX500 for linux, and 4 old 1TB hdd Model: Hitachi HDT721010SLA360 x2, Model: WDC WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0 x2, mechanical drives have about 5.5 years of sumed power on working time and no signs of fatigue so far. In work we have some Synology nas + Synology drives (no idea about model of drives inside) and WD8003FFBX WD Red pro for asustor nas. @@arshkarim_

[@sometechguy]

For the smaller capacity drives, I have a video that compares enterprise drives to desktop drives for failures, found here : kzbin.info/www/bejne/opC8opeMfMh2ZtE. But the short answer is that desktop drives are not generally statistically more likely to fail than enterprise, despite the lower warranty. But the warranty of course allows you to get a replacement for a failure. Yes its true that Seagate appears to have a higher failure rate than HGST (and recent WD drives), and Toshiba can be better also, but its also true that it varies by model, and any drive can fail, or last years. The failure rates over all however, are low, typically 0.5% to 1.5% AFR, meaning that there is around 1% chance that a drive will fail in any given year. So I personally wouldn't avoid Seagate and I have a lot of Seagate drives and have had a good experience. But I would do the following things. 1) Make sure that you do not have 1 copy of data you can't lose on any single disk or in any single drive array. If you care, have a backup. For things I really care about, I have more than 1 backup and keep one somewhere different. 2) If a drive shows signs of failure, replace it. 3) Buy base on pricing, as well as its reliability. I am not saying buy known problem drives, but don't pay huge premiums for specific drives, because any can fail and see point 1. 4) Treat spinning drives properly. Secure them when in use, and don't move them. Don't have them hanging around loose in chassis. 5) Ideally use a UPS to protect systems, especially NAS's. This will result in less unscheduled shutdowns. 6) Be cautious about where you get drives from. I personally buy from trusted retailers where I believe the warranty is valid and its a new drive, the drive hasn't been shucked, removed from a system or 'refurbished'. SSDs are not better than Spinning disks. They are better for certain things. Cheap, long term storage is a good use case for spinning disks and its a more stable medium also for long term data retention. Good luck!

[@GrannyDryden]

Same. Been in the industry 20+ years. I've built a lot of PC's over that time and one thing i can tell you is that when Seagates fail, they fail HARD. What i mean by that, is that, one day all is well and then suddenly the drives start to go downhill very quickly. Seek error climb drastically and if you don't notice it in time or haven't some active SMART Monitoring keeping an eye on things, you'll have a dead drive in no time at all. In Data Centers, this isn't a huge deal, as they have hard drive redundancy as part of their model, but for home users, not as much. I stopped buying Seagate's a long time ago (i can remember when they bought out Maxtor and their plants, so they could increase their warranties from 2 years to 5). I stick with Western Digital personally, for no other reason, that when those drives start to fail, it's a noticeable, gradual downward curve, not a cliff edge.

[@GrannyDryden]

depends on the budget. If you want cheap and cheerful, then go for a Western Digital Blue drive. If you need a bit more speed (like storing your steam library on), then a Western digital Black drive should work nicely. @@arshkarim_

[@club4ghz]

I have 5 WD drives working from 5 to 16 years, none of them died expect one had errors because i dropped it on the floor but i make partitions around the broken area and it's still working.

[@landoc05]

My oldest WD Caviar Black is nearly 14 years old, daily heavy use in my main desktop (bought in early 2010, it came with a Seagate drive that failed within the week). Second oldest is 12 years old, secondary drive in that same computer now. Both are working like in the first day, no bad sectors. Both 1TB, older one is a FAEX model and slightly faster access time than the less old FZEX model. I only buy WD Caviar Black 1TB since then. I have a couple more (both FZEX) in secondary machines, both much newer, so far working fine. These newer ones match the access time (13ms) of the FAEX one.

[@novantha1]

One note: One of the most important brands for reliability is actually the brand servicing the drive. Ie: you. Your usage of the drive massively influences its lifespan. If you keep the drives turned off for most of its life it’ll last significantly longer. I personally recommend buffering them with SSDs, and only turning on your drives very infrequently (one a week or month is ideal).

[@superstition777]

Terrific job on the analysis. I'm in the market for 8 22TB drives for a NAS and this is invaluable. New subscriber here!

[@sometechguy]

Welcome and thank you! Backblaze just released data and they have deployed a large number of Ultrastar 22tb drives in the last 6 months. The drives do not have a lot of time on them yet, but I will be doing an update that includes this and the other added data since the last video.

[@AI-PhotographyGeek]

00:01 Analysis of drive reliability data for 10TB+ hard drives from Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. 01:59 Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) gives insight into drive reliability over time. 03:56 AFR numbers change over time and trend data provides a big picture view on the performance of drive cohort. 05:54 Western Digital drives' failure rates are analyzed based on drive age and not dates. 07:54 Seagate's 10TB+ hard drives show varying failure rates over time. 09:57 Toshiba drives have higher early failure rate but stabilize over time 12:00 WD Ultra Stars are the best performing drives with impressive reliability. 13:56 Western Digital drives are impressive for reliability, Seagate may not be the most reliable but they are often cheaper. WD is the worst, this is paid review.

[@sometechguy]

Hi, this isn't a paid review and I think that couldn't be much clearer, so not sure where that comment comes from. This is not in fact a review at all, but a comparison of drives based on raw data provided by a third party. The data does reveal that WD, in recent times at least, appear to provide the best reliability. I don't however say they are the 'best drives' and point out that price is a consideration also, and that actually Seagate drives may be a better choice even with the reliability difference, due to the pricing and the fact that warranty coverage does allow any failures to be replaced. But from your comment, I guess you don't like WD, which is completely fine and many have these views based on anecdotal experience. But claiming its a paid promotion simply because you don't like the data is a stretch. 🙂

[@AI-PhotographyGeek]

@@sometechguy Got it. You must be a complete beginner in this field. Please see my other comment(below) I made on this video. In a simple word WD is no more than a scam to me. Backblaze data is not the realife data of user. Why Blackblaze would produce such data, it is a company only, they do manipulate things for other OEM if OEM gives too much goodies. --------------- To me, WD signifies failure. Almost 4-5 drives failed after just 1 or 2 power outages. I only trust Hitachi, Seagate, and Toshiba. I bought a SanDisk SSD, which later failed, and I discovered it was made by WD. I then purchased a G-Drive from the Apple Store, which also failed in 6 months. Upon breaking open the G-Drive packaging, I found, as expected, they were using WD drive. However, I stopped buying Hitachi after WD acquired it. --------------

[@redneckcoder]

I have never had a WD drive fail out of at least 20 drivers. I had Toshibas die within a week, 3 out of 5. Seagates all died within three years, same usage as the WDs that went for a decade.

[@AI-PhotographyGeek]

@@redneckcoder I may agree with your statement, but old WD is different story compared to from 2017-18 WD

[@redneckcoder]

@@AI-PhotographyGeek I'm sure there have been bad models in there. But I've never had them - though I stuck to Reds mostly when I did spinning drives. Now days, my working data set fits on a 4TB nvme and long term storage I've offloaded to the cloud (yay for fiber internet). I have local backups on some WD reds, 10TB.

[@Jabe_VeX]

very handy video as i go into making my own homelab, thank you so much

[@sometechguy]

You are welcome, glad you liked it.

[@TheKevalar]

an amazing analysis, absolutely shows the difference in manufacturers . allows me to make an informed choice. ❤

[@DevilbyMoonlight]

I still have old SCSI and IDE drives from over 30 years ago and the data on them is still good, 4 of them were spinning constantly in a BBS for over 8 years, the only drives I have had fail in the last 20 years are seagate.

[@xponen]

I've noticed that HDDs in older laptops with IDE interfaces (before 2007) or laptops that didn't enable AHCI (SATA) last longer than those using the SATA interface/speed. From my experimenting with UDMA setting on SATA HDDs to control the interface speed, drive-to-drive data transfer speeds were reduced when using older speed but data transfer within the drive was unaffected. In my opinion, IDE would have been sufficient for HDDs for regular users.

[@handlemonium]

Thanks for graphing out the data! Really helps a ton now that I'm considering to back up all 15+ years worth of family photos and videos after downloading it all from Google Photos, Apple iCloud, and old external hard drives. The HC530 14TB "14ALE6L4" and HC520 12TB "12ALE600" are now my *Top 2* considerations. 👍

[@sometechguy]

They are good drives, but make sure you have two copies of such things. 🫣

[@ewenchan1239]

Three things: 1) Seagate vs. WD HGST/HGST WDHGST/HGST is at worst, 1/3rd the AFR of Seagate drives, and at best, almost 1/10th the Seagate AFR. That's HUGE! 2) WDHGST/HGST This is, I think, why WD bought the HGST division from IBM/Hitachi because the drives AREN'T the fastest in terms of read/write/I/O/s performance, but they're absolutely rock solid drives. And yes, whilst you pay more for the initial capex for the drives itself, it also pays dividends with having a lower overall failure rate vs. Seagate. 3) This data shows why I avoid Seagate drives like the plague. 2024 and not all of their drives have some kind of ramp load/unload mechanism for the drive read/write heads, which STILL leads to their R/W heads crashing into the disk platters in some failure cases. This tech is almost 25 years old by now. I remember when IBM first introduced it in 2000 (which then became HGST).

[@LatitudeSky]

Agrees. Used to buy Hitachi drives and now buy the HGST WD drives and they've been extremely reliable. Knock on wood. WD NVME Black has also been excellent. Really hope they maintain quality after the current split.

[@celtichawks]

Chapters please, saves time if we dont want to watch every detail

[@samsabruskongen]

it's a 15 min video ffs

[@p.p.burnell7294]

Watch the video. Don't be a lazy fuck

[@Voornoek]

ADHD hits hard

[@AERGXUOS_GAMING]

@@samsabruskongen That is 15mins of life he won't get back

[@63supercobrajet]

I've been running (two) Seagate 16TB Exos (SATA) drives, (ST16000NM001G-2KK103), 24/7 for 5 years now. It's used as an NFS/media server running all the time, on XFS file system, and writing periodically, and rebooting only to upgrade OS and/or firmware. They started at 30% capacity used, and now about 60% capacity used. They've survived several power outages and still running great. The ONLY thing I'm upset about with Seagate is that they didn't have their 32TB drive out back then.

[@sometechguy]

I am also itching for those HAMR drives, I believe they have been providing them to cloud scale customer for a long time, I assume the demand outstrips supply and this is why they are not generally available. And those NM001G drives have a good record I believe.

[@bennysh]

thanks for taking the time making other's choice much easier

[@sigerlion8608]

My 2GB Seagate drive just went kaput after 2 years of minimal use. Even after reformatting and resetting the drive, it only partial transfers/downloads a file and then stops. I now need a replacement and that's what turned me to your comparison videos. Thanks for these detailed videos.

[@sometechguy]

Sorry, sounds unlucky. But thank you for checking out my channel, and I hope the video was useful in helping you compare the manufacturers and products. I have some other videos that look at different aspects of the failure data, but I have not yet covered the disks under 2Tb. I think a lot of people still use these in PCs or for offline backup, so I will take a look that data and see if it provides useful information that's worth digging into. Good luck with the new disk!

[@sigerlion8608]

@@sometechguy Sorry, meant 2 TB, not GB.

[@EJEuth]

@@sometechguyReviewing the 1TB and 2TB 3.5” HDD would be great. For instance: I have almost 10 of them: 5x 2TB (HGST being 2x in a NAS Raid0), 2x NAS 1TB (Maxtor and brand?), 1TB USB (Bufallo). And several (~20 units) of 2.5” from Seagate and WD, ranging from 160GB to 1TB, but mostly in the 320GB-640GB range. ​​⁠Reviewing the 1TB and 2TB 3.5” HDD would be great. For instance: I have almost 10 of them: 5x 2TB (HGST being 2x in a NAS Raid0), 2x NAS 1TB (Maxtor and brand?), 1TB USB (Bufallo). And several (~20 units) of 2.5” from Seagate and WD, ranging from 160GB to 1TB, but mostly in the 320GB-640GB range. As most of these are now “off-line” HDD, for storage or backup, expect for the ones used in LAPTOP’s main HDD (after ~5Y, being replaced by SSD), their actual accumulated hour is typically small (guess to be in the range 1K~5K Hr), but 90% were purchased in 2009~2011. Thank you for sharing such great compilation of information.

[@angrysocialjusticewarrior]

@@sigerlion8608 Its common knowledge that seagate makes unreliable drives (they are hit or miss), and for some reason it is considered taboo to say this even though we all know it. Usually when you say this, you will get a response along the lines of (oh well its not just seagate, all drives have a chance to fail". Trust me, even though any drive has a chance to fail, seagate drives have the highest chance. I feel like seagate has a real life failure rate of 40% after around 3 years but people don't want to admit it.

[@sigerlion8608]

@@angrysocialjusticewarrior Yeah, I barely used the drive. Only uploaded files every few months. Kept it in a cool place. Never bumped or dropped it, and it still failed before reaching 2 years.

[@hopelessnerd6677]

Awesome info! It always intrigues me that in these days of modern times when almost everything is CNC machined to molecular tolerances and the parts should be absolutely identical, that there is this much difference in the failure rates of the different brands/models. Cars are another good example. One person can buy a particular make/model of car and get 500000 trouble-free miles, and another will get a lemon that is in the shop every other week for a new transmission. Doesn't make sense. Hard drives are amazing devices in any case.

[@leokimvideo]

Seagate has for a long time had trouble with drive failures

[@ianemery2925]

I was really iffy about buying a 14TB WD drive a few years ago; but from your charts, it would seem I picked the best of any brand at the time.

[@bricefleckenstein9666]

If it was an Ultrastar model, that's the old HGST design - WD finally got to merge their HGST purchase from about a DECADE ago into the company a couple years ago. Most reliable drives on the market overall, and WD seems to have been smart enough to have the HGST staff keep designing that line and NOT mess up their production.

[@Jannickjay]

@@bricefleckenstein9666 i would love to buy hgst again, but Cant find it… so hgst is now WD Gold or how?

[@deniswauchope3788]

Kudos to you for crunching all that data, and the conclusions you drew seem accurate to me. I must be lucky; my 2012 PC build had 4 Seagate HDDs, and one of them (4TB, huge in those days) is now showing its age but the others are still going strong. Maybe it's because mostly my PC runs 24/7, so they don't get the stop/start which I reckon ages them quicker. Now I'll be looking into some HGSC drives for my new build!

[@sisajtegabre]

yes truning on off have an impact. IMHO brand is not important, but which factory makes it. Old hitachi that were i think taken by WD were amazing, if you find some old Hitachi 3,5'' new but older then 8+ years )left in some shop etc) they were great. Also 2,5'' Hitachi. but i would consider to get also SSD, last year price were low, now they are again high. For example i got 1 T SSD SP for 40 US$ only, Taiwan made HW brand. ''Silicon Power'' i like them, they have min failures when i asked my school friends who work in PC repair shops. Samsung SSD are expansive but the aren'0t better then SP, they poosh it for well recognizable name, due old Samsung disc were good. Adata is OK, Patriot was hit and miss. So for know i like SP the most when it comes to SSD, M2, even memory RAM is great. And for HDD is old Hitachi or WD.

[@DigitalIndependent]

A huge thanks to you and to Backblaze for making this data available!

[@ContraVsGigi]

Impressive work, it is very interesting even for one not working in this field anymore.

[@sometechguy]

Thank you, appreciate you taking the time to comment. 🙏

[@JohanH1990]

Massive thanks to you and Backblaze, ordered the Seagate Exos X18 ST16000NM000J for my home build NAS to replace the 2015 Zyxel 325v2 with WD Red WD30EFRX. Little bit critical point of no return 😂

[@matthewteden2212]

Incredible video, man. You went far beyond what I expected to find on this topic. I appreciate all the time you put into this video, and it is a HUGE help as I look for drives!

[@sometechguy]

Thank you for the comment and feedback. There is another years data now and includes the start, at least of data on a large number of 22Tb drives. So an update is due, but a couple of other things to come first. Glad you liked it.

[@johngoodspeed3585]

Excellent video, well researched, much appreciated!

[@sometechguy]

Thank you 🙏

[@andynonimuss6298]

I have several 15 year-old Western Digital drives that still work just fine.

[@sometechguy]

This is good to hear. The data shows they are excellent drives, and I did some other analysis also comparing the manufacturers more broadly and HGST and the WD descendants come out glowing.

[@mrkgrmn3]

I've had bad luck with Seagate drives. Your data confirms my suspicions about their reliability.

[@basspig]

I used to employ several dozen mechanical hard drives and saw a failure about every 18 months on average. In 2015 I replaced all of the mechanical hard drives with solid state drives. To this day I have not had a single Drive failure.

[@verygoodbrother]

Are the SSDs high capacity drives i.e. >8TB?

[@darkydaff]

@@verygoodbrother I don't think those were available in 2015

[@basspig]

@@verygoodbrother not in 2015. I have many 1 and 2TB drives from 2015. I upgraded some to 4TB in 2016-17 and that's where it is now.

[@verygoodbrother]

@@basspig So it's not cheaper in the long term if you need high capacity drives (e.g. for a NAS). I've not had a hdd fail on me over the past 6 years so i don't think reliability factors as much.

[@basspig]

@@verygoodbrother as one who is getting his electricity from off grid solar, I have to consider energy consumtion. 14W per drive adds up. My old PC prior to 2015, consumed 880W off the wall socket. It had ten HDDs in it, and one would fail every 12-18 months. Now I'm running all SSDs and wall socket consumption is 64W.

[@kklum6998]

Very informative. Well made with easy data analysis on a statistical chart that is easy to follow. The presentation and breakdown are top-notch. (Usually, these types of narrations on data will put me to sleep) I greatly appreciate your data crunching skills. I have been trying to get this type of data for many years but do not know how or where. Thank you. Kudos on your channel. Subscribed.

[@andreb.1336]

The data matches my experiences. Great work!

[@sometechguy]

Appreciate it, and thanks for watching. 🙌

[@Stoney_Eagle]

Seeing my experience backed up by numbers is fantastic! I have had so many hard drives fail from many different brands, and have lost a lot of data because of it. I have yet to have a Western Digital to give the ghost on me without complaining about old age first for months of slow speeds, screaming "Please retire me" 😂 Many drives die by looking at it wrong but have rough-handled WD's, and they are still alive today. This is how you earn my brand loyalty! PS. Don't worry I have grown up now and backup properly on raided systems.

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

Yes, I've been a long time WD user, because all this time, to me, they've proven to be most reliable, overall. In my box of antiques I have one of the first SATA drives, a WD1600, from 2003. I can plug it in and use it if I like, even now. Still works perfectly thanks to the FD bearing. In fact, all the WD drives still work and I have a lot of them, accumulated over the years. HGST also performs very well, and Seagate...well...I've had plenty of those conk out on me. Quantum drives never failed me, until Seagate raped them. Never had IBM drives, they tended to have bad batches. When it was bought by Hitachi, quality went up dramatically (This is now HGST). Moderately satisfied with Toshiba 3.5 inch drives, their 2.5 inch laptop drives are exceedingly good.

[@m1stertim]

RAID is not a backup

[@Stoney_Eagle]

@@m1stertim I think you missed the s there at the end. 😉

[@rollerboogie]

I worked at 2x of these companies. One had me look through backblaze data for an interview question. What id say is that modern HDD are incredibly complex and precise electromechanical devices. Pretty mindblowing they work at all.

[@JDARJISJ]

As a former IBM/ HGST employee, I am happy to see that our work is still bearing high quality fruit.

[@sometechguy]

😎👍

[@clutch2315]

This is wild. Ill certainly be using this information for some future drive purchases

[@mushrifahmed8107]

This is such a great and helpful video. Really appreciate all the work you did into making this.

[@TheDanishConstructionChannel]

Ever since my encounter with the infamous IBM 75GXP series of hard drives, i have used Western Digital HDD, and i have never been disappointed :)

[@sometechguy]

Well, IBM and Hitachi's disk business merged back in 2003 and became HGST. And in 2012, HGST was acquired by WD and the HGST Ultrastars became the basis of WD's enterprise disk offering, and I am sure part of all their disk ranges. So maybe a little part of those 75GXP's are still living in your computer.....haunting you. 👻

[@TheDanishConstructionChannel]

@@sometechguy Hehe yeah i know, but i am hoping that they tossed all the IBM stuff, and just used their own technology 😅😅 Noo i hope not, i bought 3 45 gigs disk, and 2 of them died, i think with in 1 year, so i emptied the last one and binned it, before i lost any more data (Porn) 🤣🤣

[@DerSystematiker]

Long story short: - if you have a large number of discs you have to change faulty drives anyway and the cheaper Seagate drives make sense from economical standpoint. - If you are building a server/nas for you home and you want to get close to zero defect discs as possible, you should pay the extra money and get the WD drives. ...this confirms my personal observation.

[@NickDoddTV]

Your video reinforced my own 16+ years in web hosting. While I had strong support for Seagate early on in my business, they've definitely failed a lot more than any other drive. HGST has been my new favorite brand for a while and hasn't let me down just yet.

[@sometechguy]

Thanks for leaving the comment. While, due to the way failure distribution works there can be different experiences, its good to hear that a lot of people share the experiences that the data shows, especially those that have experience with higher drive volumes. Appreciate you sharing.

[@cloudmover]

What a wonderful and informative video. Just the facts. Thank you for making some NAS HD upgrades an easier purchase.

[@sometechguy]

My pleasure, and thank you for the feedback.

[@mickeyagrawal2001]

Hard work is always appreciated. Thanks for the video.

[@sometechguy]

Kind words are also always appreciated, so thank you. 🙏

[@stevens1041]

This is incredibly useful. Thanks mate.

[@sometechguy]

No problem 👍

[@Slugg-O]

That's a lot of info and I know it was a lot of work. Thank you! The Seagate results came as no surprise. They are a huge drive manufacture and a lot of companies and individuals are happy with them, and I'm sure they have made many great drives. Unfortunately, they never made one for me which is why I avoid them like the crackhead at the gas station.

[@bzdtemp]

Love the video. Thank you. And since finding real drive reviews, as those that are to be found tend to be more like, look at one drive in a family and then pretend it speaks for all of them. This then makes your work even more helpful.

[@sometechguy]

Thank you, appreciate this. You can review drives for performance and noise, but can’t really do this for reliability until the drives have got to, or close to their warranty period. And even then, doing this for one or a few drives isn’t very useful. So I think this is the lost useful way of seeing how there drives really perform in a real world scenario, even though BackBlaze may be a harsher environment than some but that is probably a good thing to make sure the drives are subjected to some real work. Thanks for commenting!

[@JeremyLeePotocki]

I got three Seagate Barracuda Drives (Model# ST8000DM004-2CX188) that have been running (mostly) 24/7 for 31500+ hours one of them has finally gave me the caution flag in SMART so I've been needing to get them replaced. I have been deciding on what to get next this video has been a big help. I am planing on getting two 16TB Drives so I can reduce the amount of mechanical drives I have (one in my rig & one as a external backup). All my other drives are going to be solid state.

[@jarsky]

I recently upgraded my NAS from my old HGST He8 drives to Seagate Exos. I had 1 X16 arrive DOA (Reallocating Sectors etc...from day 1)..however I dont think it was a logistical shipping issue as the others have been perfectly fine shipped in the same packing foam package. The X20's have been fantastic; no issues with any of them.

[@OutlawNix]

About ten years ago, I ceased using mechanical hard drives. I exclusively used Western Digital drives, but my trust in them was shattered after experiencing drive failures within just three months of ownership. I now exclusively use solid-state drives and still possess the first one I purchased, which continues to operate with a significant amount of usable life remaining.

[@EpicLPer]

Most of the drives I've ever had fail in my life, be it my own drives or from people around me, were mainly Seagate, and that for like 15 years minimum now... why is that company still around and what are they doing...

[@walkman1269]

I've always FELT HGST and WD Enterprise were the bomb. I see that my gut feeling was right. I had a 4TB die once but it was consumer grade.

[@sometechguy]

Unfortunately, any disk can die and for different reasons, so backups are always important. I get a variety of comments on videos about various vendors and people are most likely to hate on products that have failed on them understandably, but WD seem to have broad respect for their HDDs at least, and the data seems to support that. So yes, your gut isn't failing you! Thanks for commenting and sharing. 😎

[@DrHarryT]

I worked on two Dell computers that failed because of WD Blue drives. Ever since then I steer clear of WD drives, I typically go with Seagate.

[@bioxbiox]

Excellent video and analysis! I am just thinking about building a home NAS with 10+ TB RAID 1 configuration so the video is straight on my needs. Thank you!

[@tomghzel]

Why Raid 1? I use Raid 5. Only had one WD disk failing and with the 5y warranty, I had a brand new one from WD within days, rebuild the raid and was good to go again. Amazing service.

[@hunn20004]

At some point, we're going to etch important data on glass, while the operating OS and other superfluous data is going to stay on semi- volitile RAM up to a month. If you shut down the system for longer, it'll use a snapshot to SSD that it'll use to boot up from, which will take a bit longer than usual.

[@captainhappy]

This data itself can be super boring thing for 99% of us, but you managed to make some sense out of it, thanks for the informative video, there really is some real value in it! I will be certainly looking this video again, at the time when I consider my options upgrading harddrives in my NAS.

[@sometechguy]

Personally I love mining data to find hidden information, but it isn't for everyone. 😁 Thanks for checking it out!

[@yoshy2628]

Fun fact: bought 2 years ago 4 x 8 TB Seagate for my NAS, new and sealed (not refurbished, but without warranty). All 4 driver started working, I have transferred 1TB to the first drive, when suddenly a head stuck sound started to be heard from my NAS. I took the affected drive out, all data lost, I've contacted Seagate for a data recovery, the valid warranty expired a month ago, cannot do data recovery. Other 3 drives are used daily, got around 20K work hours on them, with no issues whatsoever, but the first one... other story.

[@LokiDaFerret]

As an IT guy this is really handy information! So you get a thumbs up for that. 👍 However your presentation of this information is a bit lacking. It would be far easier to read the graph if you focused on one vendor at a time getting rid of all the noise from other vendors.

[@sometechguy]

Appreciate the feedback. There is always room for improvement and the balance is comparing the models from each, to how the manufacturers compare to each other. It’s been a while since I did this and there is more data becoming available, including 22Tb drives, so if I do an update, I will see what I can do to improve on the visualisations. Thanks for commenting

[@LokiDaFerret]

@@sometechguy What gravitated me to your videos is the fact that I need to buy some new drives for my NAS. So my focus is not so much on any particular model but more determining which vendor is the most reliable generally speaking. Let's face it any drive you buy is a crapshoot as to its longevity. You need to find a happy balance between price and risk.

[@sometechguy]

@@LokiDaFerret you may have seen it, but I did a video comparing the vendors where the data is cut into models lines vs individual drive models. For example, Exos X14. X18 or Ultrastar HC520 or Tosh MG08, and for the reason you say. Thanks again.

[@geoninja8971]

I have 4 WD NAS drives - MyBook Live I think.... single drive 3 and 4TB units, bought from a department store - they are all fine, all 10-14 years old, serving video to my media player. I'm cautious with backups, waiting for *the day* that can't be far off.... :)

[@anispinner]

Bro what do you mean under 6k subs?! Subbed!

[@sometechguy]

Thanks for the sub! It all helps with growing the channel and getting better reach, so I appreciate it.

[@nimrodlevy]

The video is of supreme quality but, the 1st 6 minutes are very boring but awesome at the same time. As it make the video borderline empirical. So I really wish that the videos will be segmented because sometimes you only need the conclusion. Other than that it was awesome and informative and useful. Thanks for all the effort you have put into this!

[@sometechguy]

Thank you, and understand. A video can't suit everyone but I rather than make spurious claims i want to base my conclusions on data, and provide the data so people can also draw their own conclusions. Or at least see that my conclusions are based on data, rather than anecdotal opinions. But yes, I am trying to include chapters on videos going forward. And sorry, it was 'very boring' 😢 On a serious note though, I personal like to see the data and I also like to bring the data. So I guess its a case of content for a certain audience. Maybe for some of these topics I should release a short heavily summarised version and test it out.

[@BobHannent]

That's my experience of Toshiba. Although Seagate has its issues, one thing I do notice is that mine run cooler than the other brands and I personally haven't had issues.

[@prashanthb6521]

Thanks a lot for presenting this data.

[@sometechguy]

My pleasure 👍

[@harrisedgar]

So whichone do I buy?

[@ecmjr]

Super useful and insightful. Good job!!!

[@Koozwad]

I honestly really like the classic HDD ticking sound my Toshiba X300 12TB makes. Still going strong after buying secondhand a few years ago with regular usage. Also helps to know when the drive is actually being used for diagnostic purposes.

[@sometechguy]

For sure, certain drives have personalities. 😁

[@bobbrown8661]

Seagate's are also more competitively priced, hence the larger deployment base IMO.

[@Mtaalas]

Did back-blaze include WHERE those driver were used? I mean a drive that's on a very high utilization server has completely different failure rates than server that's for daily backups which is different from one that has weekly dumps etc... That would be interesting data to take into account... Basically, IO/day data? :)

[@NoMasters.]

Great work! Except the graph was basically unreadable. The lines look one pixel thick so I couldn't tell the colors apart and most people are not going to be memorizing the drive model numbers so there's no way most people are going to know which drive is which until you tell them and personally I had a hard time following which drive you were talking about and had to rewind several times. When combining a lot of visual data and auditory data, slow it down, and be more systematic in the delivery. Thanks for all your hard work! It was useful data for me personally and I subscribed and will be checking back in

[@sometechguy]

So 'Great work' but not use to you at all? 🤣 Sorry if this was the case, were you viewing this on a phone or on a smaller display? I think even if so, its good feedback for future videos to try and make this more accessible. So appreciate the comment and the feedback, and the sub of course also. More content in the works and hopefully you find it all valuable.

[@NoMasters.]

@@sometechguy Oh no it was definitely usable with some rewinds and mostly listening to you. But if I wanted to just pause the screen and read the graph for myself, as I personally often do, it was a pain in the butt to read. Doable tho. It was great work overall and I super appreciate the hard data driven approach, and the scientific literacy you appear to bring to the table. I was able to get useful info. I hope my first comment didn't come off as rude and I'm genuinely sorry if it did. You know I meant to tell you lol I actually tried looking at your graph first on a 27in 1440p, next a 55in 4K, and I'm now checking next on my 1080p phone. So looks about the same except now the text is a struggle to read, as well. I could put my phone in 1440p mode and maybe see it a bit better, but battery life... I can see the colors maybe a bit better or the same in the graph itself, but crucially not the legend/key. Those thin little lines next to model numbers mostly all look the same. I wasn't sure it was supposed to be legend/key at first glance. I will admit I am recently 40 and starting to need reading glasses for particularly small stuff, so take my single data point with a grain of salt. I've already watched a couple more useful videos, btw. Great to have another data driven channel to go to :)

[@sometechguy]

Thanks, it’s really useful feedback and as long as feedback is constructive and actionable, I always welcome it. I have some other videos I am currently working on, but will be doing an update on this one before long as there is updated data now available that contains more of the 22Tb disks. So I will certainly to consider this kind of feedback when I work on the visuals for that one, and other videos.

[@NYCamper62]

Bought a WD750 Black early 2000's I think it was. Used it as a boot drive for NT. Still using it as a storage drive today.

[@leaf16nut]

I’ve always been a WD guy, haven’t had one die in the last 15 years of PC gaming, but 12TB Seagate drives were on sale and too good to pass up, only using it as for media storage with not a lot of reads or writes so hopefully it lasts 😫

[@blahorgaslisk7763]

This was a long time ago. A representative for WD talked a bit about the test and quality of different drives. He told me they had tested the cheaper drives to the same standard as the professional drives. The reason they put so much effort in the cheaper drives was that at the volumes they shipped a single failing cheap drive would eat up the income for something like ten other drives. Meanwhile a professional drive that failed and had to be replaced would only eat up the income for something like five or six other drives of the same kind. So the reliability of the cheap drives were actually more important financially. It kind of broke my idea about how the big drive manufacturers worked. We kept selling enterprise drives to our customers even after that. It wasn't worth shaking the tree that hard.

[@ImShubhamY]

When i went to buy 16 TB Seagate from a local store, the store recommended me WD due to high failure of Seagate, since i didn't had any preference between them, i bought WD. Glad i bought WD.

[@janbrittenson210]

It's not just about rotation, but also actuations. Actuations (head movement) creates vibrations which adds spindle bearing wear - in addition to the actuator itself of course. It would also be useful to know what constitutes a failure, presumably early on it's mechanical problems, or it flat out doesn't work at all (like won't spin up) - while later it shifts to high soft error counts and rapidly growing bad block maps?

[@andersonklein3587]

Woah, WD really did an order of magnitude better. This is impressive. It'd be cool to see this same analysis done SSDs, I'd pay a few dollars extra for that kind of reliability on my workstation.

[@GetOffMyyLawn]

Does backblaze track idle time vs usage? As a home server user, my drives are spinning 100% of the time, but active use is probably much less than 12 hours a day.

[@sometechguy]

I don't think SMART has any stats that tell you that, and the data is basically daily SMART extracts along with data on when drives died. So you can see when a drive first appeared, when it disappeared and if it disappeared due to a failure or not. But drives themselves don't record usage, other than number of power down events etc, for which there are very few, probably maintenance. That said, these will be in chassis in large arrays, so I would imagine they are being accessed pretty much 24x7.

[@GetOffMyyLawn]

Ya, I guess we can view their info as a torture test weeding out the weakest drives. All good info... thanks!

[@veritas7010]

Not surprised by the data. I notice trends with regards to performance with nvmes in favor of WD also

[@Turco949]

Informative and very much correlates what I always thought of the brands in general. As stated, for this study to be much more accurate, a longer testing duration needed (5+ years min.).

[@PhrontDoor]

Might I suggest that you do another data run where you exclude drive failures before 3 months -- as I think that's clobbering some 'long-term' stats.

[@sometechguy]

When I parsed the data, I had two objective options. One was to use all the failure data up to each point, and the other was to calculate each AFR data point based on just the one weeks data. e.g. how many drives fail in exactly week x. The first produces a smoothed result which shows the aggregated AFR over time, but you are right that it incorporates historical data so each data point shows the full AFR performance of the model up to that age. The second approach produces a very spiky graph where AFR varies from 0 to multiple 100's of a %, so its difficult to produce a useful and comprehensible plot. It does tell you the likelihood more accurately of the chance for failure at a specific age. But as its all statistical data, I am not sure that is useful. Just because more drives failed in week 60 than 59 or 61, doesn't mean that further drives are more likely to fail at exactly week 60. Overall, option one is likely the more robust and realistic approach. Yes, early failures impact AFR stats on the drives later. But I think that's valid, as those drives did indeed fail prior to that point in the timeline and you would want that surfaced. Excluding a set period like you suggest would do what you say, but I think it makes the analysis more subjective as you can choose the cut off to intentionally or otherwise favor certain drive models. But I could test this the next run I do to see if it produces useful output. Thanks for the thoughtful post, it sounds like you looked at the data, which makes me happy. 😊

[@Arindam_Gaming]

Can confirm what is stated in video. My WD Black is 8 yrs & going strong while my Seagate twice failed under 3-4 yrs.

[@RAZTubin]

This is great information. I wonder if you can do the same analysis for NVMe and SSD.

[@sometechguy]

I have not found a good data source for SSDs yet with a significant quantity of data. Backblaze do have some SSD in their dataset, but the numbers are very low so hard to get meaningful data unfortunately. I think the nature of what they do means that they don’t have the high performance requirement to justify the cost of those disks, so it’s all about high volume storage. And other than BackBlaze, no one else really shares their data.

[@jfox8888]

So.... after going through the video, thank you for the free content and the effort put in. the conclusion im getting is : WD first, HGST [ unlikely avaliable], followed by toshiba ? my comment is that : theres no take away point from the entire video, if im a layman, going for what is the recommended. Yes theres not much further data to infer to, but there can always be disclaimers given that things go wrong, and will have higher chances as the size increases

[@sometechguy]

I prefer to stay away from telling people what they should do, and instead provide data to make their own informed choice from. The overall reliability of the drive is not the only factor, price availability and reputation of the vendor is also something that varies over time and location. Some people are not interested in the detail and just want to be told which to buy, others will want the data and make their own choices. So its a balance. But I take the feedback that the conclusions could be more concise. Creating content is about learning and improving with each video, so this feedback is constructive and useful. Thank you for that!

[@reecenaidu6020]

two of my drives over the last decade failed at the sata-to-usb adapter. The 1st one was a Vebatim, and the usb end's contacts broke. Taped this one up, copied everything off, and retired the drive. The 2nd one's adapter just stopped working one day. Fortunately I had bought 2 of that Seagate drive while it was on sale, so could test and find the problem. Gonna have to get a sata to usb cable to use the other drive regularly again

[@bakcompat]

Refurb ST16000NM001G units are $126 each on fleabay right now. With an AFR of under 1% even after 3.5 years with a large sample size, this seems like the cheapest large disk right now. As with any large disk, it should be thoroughly tested before deploying tho in case of failure. I think I will be picking 8 of them up shortly.

[@blahorgaslisk7763]

Back many years I remember Seagate having a series that was very low quality. The failure rate was very close to 100% over a year. Yet we had a customer who never let us replace the drive he had. Instead we opened it up and nudged the read write head and closed the drive back up again. It would continue working for 3 to 6 months before failing and that customer would be back again. It was incredible that the drive kept working. From all I knew about HDD's it should have crashed the head, but instead it just worked. Another drive I had, a Maxtor I think it was, was also strange. A metallic sticker had been torn off opening a hole in the cover of the drive. The disks pushed air out of that hole so I could feel it on my fingers. It also made the drive sound strange. That drive I swapped out for a customer who wanted a larger drive. I kept using it for test installations of windows on machines and it just kept working even though I expected it to die at any time. But for a few years I used it over and over and it never gave up. Finally we sold a crapload of IBM "Deathstar" drives. I'm talking about several hundred of the worst of the worst model. And yet we had less than ten that came back before they were out of warranty. It was strange that we had that much luck with that drive that was documented to have extremely high failure rates. We had them in our own server, and in six years none of those died.

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

ST3420 or 2340 perhaps? I remember those drives failing in bunches back in 1995. Some IBM drive cases would warp above 45C and crash the heads.

[@sometechguy]

People complain about disk failures, and its understandable because they can have a really serious emotional impact to people when they contain important data like photos, especially if not backed up. But considering the incredible precision engineering and moving parts, they still often last 5-10 years. I just did a video on the engineering on the new Seagate Mozaic drives, and its amazing the things work like they do.

[@Atticman1369]

Awesome video! My 2 HGST 4TB 7200 Red label NAS drives that I've had since late 2014 and they are still going. I'm actually quite surprised I haven't had a drive drop out of my RAID-1. Although the drives are powered down when not being used for 30 minutes which is good, but they do have a lot of spin up counts. Looking for the ideal double digit terabyte drive for a raid 5 configuration with the hot spare.

[@FloydMaxwell]

Rule #1 -- as true today as it was 20 years ago -- avoid Seagate drives

[@Boz1211111]

Oops

[@nask0]

amen brother. I've worked on various data centres for past 20 years and Seagate always had the nost failure rates

[@ace5]

out of the 50 or so hard drives ive owned in my life, only 2 failed, both were seagate :( also only 2 seagate i owned..

[@evertonperk661]

I still have a 7200.11 that failed... First time I've been angry at a manufacturer

[@michael_the_chef]

Modern seagate exos are perfectly fine

[@TheNiteNinja19]

I still have a HGST Deskstar NAS that's been on for 10 years straight, and still cooking along. I wish they were still around.

[@vsmh96]

The Deskstar series were once referred to as DeathStars 😂

[@DJdoppIer]

The DOA / dead in weeks rate for some of those Toshiba drives are insane! Sure you can get them replaced under warranty, but that's an annoying hassle for people that need to deploy them ASAP. I gotta wonder what kind of (if any) QC goes on at Toshiba.