Hard drive Failure Rates

Handruin

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I just ordered 5 new HGST 4TB NAS 7200 RPM drives for my new ZFS NAS. This chart helped influence my decision to go with HGST.
 

Handruin

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$165/drive total shipped from newegg. Their sale ended last night with a limit of 5...so that's why I bought 5. I need 3 more for my build. Normal price is $185. I hope newegg packages them better. Amazon wanted the $185 + tax so I figured I'd roll the dice and take a chance on the savings from newegg.
 

Mercutio

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Over the course of a month, the Seagate and Hitachi drives both seem to go on sale for at least one week at both Amazon and Newegg, but limit 2 and limit 5 are both very common.
Just play a waiting game and you'll get your setup working sooner or later.

What platform are you planning to use with ZFS?
 

Handruin

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Over the course of a month, the Seagate and Hitachi drives both seem to go on sale for at least one week at both Amazon and Newegg, but limit 2 and limit 5 are both very common.
Just play a waiting game and you'll get your setup working sooner or later.

What platform are you planning to use with ZFS?

That's kind of what I figured. Some deal will come around again and I can just add on to my ZFS pool over time.

I just mentioned to SD in another thread that I went with a Supermicro X10SL7-F motherboard with an onboard 8 port LSI 2308 that I'll use in IT mode. I'll run ZFS on a flavor of Linux...not yet sure which distro. I paired the motherboard with an Intel Xeon E3 1270 v3 as a newegg package deal ($65 off combined). I ordered 16GB RAM (2x 8GB) for now and will likely bump it to 32GB. I plan to use two SSDs mirrored for L2ARC & ZIL but haven't decided yet on the parts I want to use for this. I'm still trying to decide what case to go with to hold everything. I read mixed reviews on the Norco cases and the Supermicro cases are 2x the cost but seem pretty nice.
 

Handruin

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Nice. I hadn't gone back since last night. That's just about the same amount off. $166.49 vs $165.
 

Handruin

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For whatever it's worth the 4TB HGST NAS drives all shipped in individual retail packaging from Newegg. Four of them came in their own crate from HGST with one on the side bubble wrapped in another box. That's more preferred than how Newegg shipped drives in the past.
 

Stereodude

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I'm confused and it seems they are too. HGST is WD. The Hitachi Deskstar drives that they like are now sold as Toshiba, not HGST (a WD company).
 

LunarMist

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It looks like they use consumer drives in NAS or SAN, etc. I'm not sure how that equates to PC use, but all my 3-4 TB Seagates are working just fine.
 

Mercutio

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It looks like they use consumer drives in NAS or SAN, etc. I'm not sure how that equates to PC use, but all my 3-4 TB Seagates are working just fine.

I believe that they historically buy in sufficient volume that they're more concerned with getting a certain number of spindles of a certain capacity at a time rather than any other characteristic or metric. They buy whatever their logistics can give them. During the storage crisis after the floods in Singapore, they were actually to the point of buying up all the high capacity external drives they could find in retail outlets because those were by that point the only drives they could get at a reasonable price. Clearly, they aren't picky.

These guys also say they've had better luck with Deskstar drives than Ultrastars, so it's not that they aren't buying enterprise drives at all.
 

Stereodude

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Just remember to run out and buy HGST drives!!! I'll be buying the Toshiba drives though. ;)

Hopefully they'll move past 4TB though.
 

LunarMist

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Just remember to run out and buy HGST drives!!! I'll be buying the Toshiba drives though. ;)

Hopefully they'll move past 4TB though.

I thought the 7200 RPM 6TB Hitachi NADS drive was a nice one for modern use. :scratch:
 

time

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I'm confused and it seems they are too. HGST is WD. The Hitachi Deskstar drives that they like are now sold as Toshiba, not HGST (a WD company).

After wasting a lot of hours trying to find the truth, I think this is mostly true: the designs for the legacy HGST desktop models passed to Toshiba, along with the factories. Toshiba also received enough IP to be able to design (or complete a design for) new 5TB and 6TB drives, which are now available. The Toshiba-branded models are reported to be quieter, but that may be just a normal incremental product improvement.

In contrast, I've noticed that HGST seems to be concentrating on "NAS" drives and "Enterprise" drives (Ultrastar). Presumably, these are newer designs that HGST kept for themselves - note that the exact details of the 3-way agreement have not been publicly revealed.

I suspect that the public perception of WD swallowing a struggling HGST are almost the inverse of the reality. Looking at products rather than sales, it now appears that HGST had far superior 2.5" designs, more reliable 3.5" designs and new ultra-high capacity designs that successfully leveraged exotic technologies. Note that despite the much smaller size of HGST, their CEO became WD's president and COO. A year later, he was given full control of WD as CEO and appointed his own people to executive positions. HGST has been allowed to trade independently of WD, an unusual outcome in this situation.
 

Stereodude

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In contrast, I've noticed that HGST seems to be concentrating on "NAS" drives and "Enterprise" drives (Ultrastar). Presumably, these are newer designs that HGST kept for themselves - note that the exact details of the 3-way agreement have not been publicly revealed.
The write ups I read a while back indicated that WD had to "give" the 3.5" drive portion of the business to Toshiba in order for regulators to approve the WD/HGST merger/acquisition. If that's the case I don't think they would be able to keep any portion of HGST's 3.5" drives or designs. That would point to the HGST drive being relabeled WD drives targeted at a different market segment.
 

Mercutio

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HDDs are very much an undifferentiated commodity product. Of what benefit would allowing alternative branding be for WD? I mean, besides the fact that its own name is already synonymous with terminal ass cancer.

When was the last time Seagate used the Maxtor brand name?
 

Stereodude

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Usually after a merger/acquisition one of the brands lingers around for a little while before being swallowed up. It seems like HGST is in the phase-out portion which is why their HGST logo has "A Western Digital company" under it. They're getting people used to the fact that HGST is WD.
 

Handruin

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I did a little investigation after reading about HGST here and also couldn't determine if they're made by WD or not. Even if they are, BackBlaze seems to have good luck with their 4TB drives in the environment they run them in. I'm hoping mine hold up as well as BB has reported.

If you read the comments on the BackBlaze article, one of the employees of the blog indicated in a few weeks they will publish the raw data from their statistics which means more analysts can be done (assuming their data is complete). One post suggested their database of info was over 3GB.
 

LunarMist

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I did a little investigation after reading about HGST here and also couldn't determine if they're made by WD or not. Even if they are, BackBlaze seems to have good luck with their 4TB drives in the environment they run them in. I'm hoping mine hold up as well as BB has reported.

If you read the comments on the BackBlaze article, one of the employees of the blog indicated in a few weeks they will publish the raw data from their statistics which means more analysts can be done (assuming their data is complete). One post suggested their database of info was over 3GB.

Is BackBlaze like the company behind Amazon or the Google storage or something else?
 

LunarMist

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Usually after a merger/acquisition one of the brands lingers around for a little while before being swallowed up. It seems like HGST is in the phase-out portion which is why their HGST logo has "A Western Digital company" under it. They're getting people used to the fact that HGST is WD.

It's been several years now, so I'm sure when they will separate. Hitachi is still known as IBM by some, so perhaps they like the association.
 

Handruin

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Is BackBlaze like the company behind Amazon or the Google storage or something else?

Not that I'm aware of. They're an inexpensive cloud backup provider for individuals. I haven't explored their entire offering so it's possible they may offer enterprise/corporate back now also.
 

Stereodude

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I have two USB3.0 3.0TB Seagate Backup Plus drives that I use for offline backup. I wonder if the failure prone 3TB Seagate drives are in those.
 

LunarMist

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Yes. The cheapies.

I have over a dozen of the 4TB 5900RPM drives. There are only a few tens or hundreds of hours on the drives, which are normally used for backups or offsite archives.
 
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