We are constantly looking at new hard drives, evaluating them for reliability and power consumption. The Hitachi 3TB drive (Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630) is our current favorite for both its low power demand and astounding reliability. The Western Digital and Seagate equivalents we tested saw much higher rates of popping out of RAID arrays and drive failure. Even the Western Digital Enterprise Hard Drives had the same high failure rates. The Hitachi drives, on the other hand, perform wonderfully.
In the second article they say that WD-RED are 2nd in reliability (WD-RED did not exist 2011). I'm happy that I've got a cheap Hitachi Ultrastar. But who knows.
As a personal anecdote: WD-Green failure rates are huge here. 24/7 Desktop machines, 240 drives. I've replaced in last 12 month at least 20 drives.
While WD has taken over Hitachi, they had to give Toshiba Hitachi's desktop 3.5" HDD operations in part of the deal of taking over Toshiba's (TSDT) Thailand factory. So if you want Hitachi's good 'ol reliability, buy Toshiba desktop drives.
Yev on Backblaze | We actually hope to see if we can collect enough data to release a "per manufacturer" report on had drive failure. We're currently collecting that data, but as always, follow the Backblaze Blog for info on that type of stuff!
From what I understand, at this point all 3 major hard disk vendors have very similar failure rates. The thing to look out for is that certain runs of drives may be "contaminated" during the manufacturing process, but knowing which ones is pretty unpredictable.
Also some combinations of devices can create problems. We had a RAID controller that randomly rebuild mirrored sets because the drive was 'dead'. After the rebuild the drive seemed fine. We concluded there was some firmware delay that caused the controller to time out some operation and call the drive 'failed'.
We replaced the drives with a different brand and the 'failures' went away.
> We concluded there was some firmware delay that caused the controller to time out some operation and call the drive 'failed'.
There is indeed a firmware setting on how long the drive spends checking for errors after it detects one, during which the drive doesn't respond. Sometimes this is too long for the RAID controller, so it drops it.
It used to be you could buy WD Caviar Black drives and tweak that timeout setting on the controller to effectively have WD RE drives (enterprise version of the WD Black drives). They removed that "feature" a few years ago.
lol my money is on Seagate.. I thought it amusing how they rebadged their crap drives as Samsungs when they bought the name because of their very good rep in the sector.
