It’s absolutely useful data, but there are a bunch of caveats that are easy to ignore.
For example, it’s easy to sort by failure rate and pick the manufacturer with the lowest number. But failures are clustered around the first 18 months of ownership, so this is more a measure of QC for these drives and less of a “how long will this drive last” thing. You’re unlikely to be buying those specific drives or run them as hard as Backblaze does.
Also, while Seagate has the highest failure rates, they are also some of the oldest drives in the report. So for the average user, this largely impacts how likely they are to get a bad drive, not how long a good drive will likely last. The former question matters more for a storage company because they need to pay people to handle drives, whereas a user cares more about second question, and the study doesn’t really address that second question.
The info is certainly interesting, just be careful about what conclusions you draw. Personally, as long as the drive has >=3 year warranty and the company honors it without hassle, I’ll avoid the worst capacities and pick based on price and features.
You’re correct, but this is pretty much “Statistics 101”. Granted most people are really bad at interpreting statistics, but I recommend looking at Backblaze reports because nothing else really comes close.
It’s absolutely useful data, but there are a bunch of caveats that are easy to ignore.
For example, it’s easy to sort by failure rate and pick the manufacturer with the lowest number. But failures are clustered around the first 18 months of ownership, so this is more a measure of QC for these drives and less of a “how long will this drive last” thing. You’re unlikely to be buying those specific drives or run them as hard as Backblaze does.
Also, while Seagate has the highest failure rates, they are also some of the oldest drives in the report. So for the average user, this largely impacts how likely they are to get a bad drive, not how long a good drive will likely last. The former question matters more for a storage company because they need to pay people to handle drives, whereas a user cares more about second question, and the study doesn’t really address that second question.
The info is certainly interesting, just be careful about what conclusions you draw. Personally, as long as the drive has >=3 year warranty and the company honors it without hassle, I’ll avoid the worst capacities and pick based on price and features.
You’re correct, but this is pretty much “Statistics 101”. Granted most people are really bad at interpreting statistics, but I recommend looking at Backblaze reports because nothing else really comes close.