Dispelling Backblaze's HDD Reliability Myth - The Real Story Covered [TT]

[KakaoDj]

Source

 

During the Thailand flooding in October 2011, Backblaze had to go to extreme lengths to procure enough drives to sustain operations. With the prices of HDD's rising exponentially, and supply in short stock, they literally took to the streets as a drastic form of damage control. They named the practice 'drive farming'.

First, they found that buying external drives was very cost effective. The whims of the market dictate that external drives are often cheaper than internal desktop drives. These drives come in small enclosures and are usually connected via USB or eSATA. Backblaze buys these drives, and strips the drives from the enclosures in a process they lovingly refer to as "shucking". Much like shucking a head of corn, they rip the enclosure apart and out pops a useable HDD.

 

 

At first they pillaged area Fry's and Costco's until some employees were eventually banned from purchasing more drives. They fanned out further and enlisted the help of friends and family to continue purchasing drives,

I don't even...

 

[madknight3]

The data from Backblaze should not influence a purchasing decision by any consumer, regardless of what type of drive they are purchasing. The innumerable variables, and lack of documentation, ensures the results are unreliable. Even for the winners, the results aren't good; the failure rates are exponentially higher than those observed in the real-world.

Read more at http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6028/dispelling-backblaze-s-hdd-reliability-myth-the-real-story-covered/index5.html#vxLfmhrLKqQ61V3m.99

 

Good enough for me. Nothing to really worry about.

[SirReallySam]

Well huh, I thought something fishy was going on.

[shizngiggles]

It did seem a bit odd that seagate drives had 24+% failure rate. No way in hell would seagate allow for such a high failure rate and if so they would definitely be hurting and would be far more consumer outcry. Thank you for posting this.

[LegendKillerRG]

WD is horrible, I will never buy from them again... Bought a 1TB drive and it does after a year of use... I got couple sea hate drive for 6-7 years and it's still working despite the IDE(I think) connectors...

[KakaoDj]

WD is horrible, I will never buy from them again... Bought a 1TB drive and it does after a year of use... I got couple sea hate drive for 6-7 years and it's still working despite the IDE(I think) connectors...

For me it was the other way around, the only seagate drive i have ever owned died after 1 year. So i guess they are all equally horrible  :lol: 

[dalekphalm]

WD is horrible, I will never buy from them again... Bought a 1TB drive and it does after a year of use... I got couple sea hate drive for 6-7 years and it's still working despite the IDE(I think) connectors...

I know it's hard to objectively look at a company when you have personally been spurned, but having a single drive you bought die on you doesn't mean anything statistically significant.

 

Google released a report on hard drives collated from their data centres, and the result of the report was that no brand was significantly worse than any other.

[EChondo]

The whole Costco and Fry's thing happened years ago.

[sysloc]

Again, RAID for a reason.

[martinrox1568]

WD is horrible, I will never buy from them again... Bought a 1TB drive and it does after a year of use... I got couple sea hate drive for 6-7 years and it's still working despite the IDE(I think) connectors...

Yeah, base your opinion on the one drive that happened to be bad, that totally makes sense

[LegendKillerRG]

Yeah, base your opinion on the one drive that happened to be bad, that totally makes sense

I got two more wd 1TB drives, one of them started clicking/dying... Been having the two drive for almost five years...

[jrfox87]

WD is horrible, I will never buy from them again... Bought a 1TB drive and it does after a year of use... I got couple sea hate drive for 6-7 years and it's still working despite the IDE(I think) connectors...

I'd chalk that up to just bad luck. Now if you had a terrible experience with their customer service while trying to get the drive replaced under warranty, then I'd agree with not trusting that company again.

[Tocsin_786]

WD is horrible, I will never buy from them again... Bought a 1TB drive and it does after a year of use... I got couple sea hate drive for 6-7 years and it's still working despite the IDE(I think) connectors...

my WD 1TB black has been working since they releasead the TB black in 2007-2008

[KakaoDj]

@LinusTech why no shoutout on the WAN show?