Re: [Discuss] Who makes the most reliable hard drives?

[Richard Pieri]

On 10/5/2014 10:54 PM, Tom Metro wrote:

It sounded like the stats don't include many Western Digital Red (NAS)
drives, and no mention is made of Seagate NAS drives. Might they fair
better? They also note that the Western Digital Green drives were not
good for reliability, being negatively impacted by vibration and their
constant power cycling (spinning down to save power).


Backblaze is near line storage: they fill up disks to capacity, spin 
them down, and leave them like that until user requests spin them up. 
You need to analyze their reports with that in mind because that's not 
what most of us would call a typical server environment.


WD Red disks are intended for front line storage: written and read more 
or less continuously. Very different kind of environment from Backblaze.


WD Green disks can be made to work sanely with a simple hdparm command:
  hdparm -q -S 250 /dev/sdX
This sets the idle power time out to five hours assuming I did the math 
right. Regardless of the math, the five WD Green disks in my home server 
don't go idle on me after issuing that command to each at boot time.


My experience is that storage density has more to do with reliability 
than manufacturer. The more densely packed the bits, the greater the 
chance that it will fail in production within a given span.


--
Rich P.
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[Discuss] Who makes the most reliable hard drives?

[Tom Metro]

An article from last January that summarizes research done by backup
service Backblaze:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175089-who-makes-the-most-reliable-hard-drives

(I've ran across this before, but interesting enough that it is worth
being reminded of.)

The nutshell summary is that Backblaze found Hitachi drives to be most
reliable, and if they were consistently price competitive, they'd only
buy Hitachi drives. They're followed closely by Western Digital, with
Seagate a more distant 3rd.

It sounded like the stats don't include many Western Digital Red (NAS)
drives, and no mention is made of Seagate NAS drives. Might they fair
better? They also note that the Western Digital Green drives were not
good for reliability, being negatively impacted by vibration and their
constant power cycling (spinning down to save power).


I was just looking at 3 TB NAS drives from the 3 manufacturers. WD and
Seagate are both priced around $120. The Hitachi around $150. Is a $30
premium worth reducing the failure rate from ~3% down to ~1%? For any
sort of low-volume business use, definitely. For home use? Maybe.

I hear WD Red (NAS) drives have become popular as desktop drives due to
their cooler operating temperatures, but I've also heard cautions that
these drives are not a good choice if not used in a redundant array.
Their firmware is optimized to give up quickly when read errors occur,
with the assumption that the RAID controller can then get the data from
another drive. If used solo, you're more apt to encounter read errors
because of this.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA
"Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting."
http://www.theperlshop.com/
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