Why would Backblaze use so many Seagate drives if they’re significantly worse? Seagate also has some of the highest Drive Days on that chart. It’s clear Backblaze doesn’t think they’re bad drives for their business.
I can only speculate on why. Perhaps they come as a package deal with servers, and they would prefer to avoid them otherwise.
There are plenty of drives of equivalent or more runtime than the Seagate drives. They cycle their drives every 10 years regardless of failure. The standout failure rate, the Seagate ST12000NM0007 at 11.77% failure, has less than half that average age.
I wouldn’t call those numbers okay. They have noticeably higher failure rates than anybody else. On that particular report, they’re the only ones with failure rates >3% (save for one Toshiba and one HGST), and they go as high as 12.98%. Most drives on this list are <1%, but most of the Seagate drives are over that. Perhaps you can say that you’re not likely to encounter issues no matter what brand you buy, but the fact is that you’re substantially more likely to have issues with Seagate.
Looks like another person commented above you with some stuff. I recall looking this up a year ago and the ssd I was looking at was in the news for unreliability. It was just that specific model.
They have had reliability issues in the past.
Nearly all brands have produced unreliable and a reliable series of hard drives.
Really have to look at them based on series / tech.
None of the big spinning rust brands really can be labeled as unreliable across the board
Backblaze.com gives stats on drive failures across their datacenters:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2024/
Seagate’s results stick out. Most of the drives with >2% failure rates are theirs. They even have one model over 11%.
Why would Backblaze use so many Seagate drives if they’re significantly worse? Seagate also has some of the highest Drive Days on that chart. It’s clear Backblaze doesn’t think they’re bad drives for their business.
I can only speculate on why. Perhaps they come as a package deal with servers, and they would prefer to avoid them otherwise.
There are plenty of drives of equivalent or more runtime than the Seagate drives. They cycle their drives every 10 years regardless of failure. The standout failure rate, the Seagate ST12000NM0007 at 11.77% failure, has less than half that average age.
Seconding this. Anecdotally from my last job in support, every drive failure we had was a Seagate. WDs and samsungs never seemed to have an issue.
Got a source on that? According to Backblaze, Seagate seems to be doing okay (Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2024 https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2024/), especially given how many models are in operation.
I wouldn’t call those numbers okay. They have noticeably higher failure rates than anybody else. On that particular report, they’re the only ones with failure rates >3% (save for one Toshiba and one HGST), and they go as high as 12.98%. Most drives on this list are <1%, but most of the Seagate drives are over that. Perhaps you can say that you’re not likely to encounter issues no matter what brand you buy, but the fact is that you’re substantially more likely to have issues with Seagate.
Looks like another person commented above you with some stuff. I recall looking this up a year ago and the ssd I was looking at was in the news for unreliability. It was just that specific model.
What brand is currently recommended? WD is taking the enshittification highway…
Latest story I know of: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/clearly-predatory-western-digital-sparks-panic-anger-for-age-shaming-hdds/