Backblaze Drive Stats for 2025
49 points
3 hours ago
| 1 comment
| backblaze.com
| HN
metadat
2 hours ago
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Seagate continues the tradition of having the highest failure rates of any manufacturer, on average.

Why is that?

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WarOnPrivacy
2 hours ago
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I have two particularly notorious Seagate periods:

    Seagate bought Conner when Conner had released several models w/ 
    leaky seals. Bad sectors started at the outer edge of the 
    platters and grew inward. We had a lot of these drives
    out there and Seagate refused to honor Conner's drive
    warranties. 

    The 7200.10 series had super high failure rates. I wound up 
    replacing every one in my care, within 2 years. The 7200.11
    drives weren't much better.
I think the last Seagate lines I truly trusted were the ST series of MFM and RLL drives.
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lycan1917
2 hours ago
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As explained at https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-..., a large proportion of Backblaze's Seagate inventory are rather old drives for a datacenter (now 5-9 years in service), so a high failure rate is expected.
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metadat
1 hour ago
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I have quantum fireball from 2000, so 26 years old, still going strong.

5 years doesn't seem that long for a drive that cost hundreds of dollars! Persistence is the point.

Just wondering why Seagate seems like the bottom of the barrel in the longevity department. Western Digital drives seem to fail a lot less frequently on average in this dataset and in my life experience.

To Seagate's credit, I do have 8x24TB drives that have been working fine for the past 4 years. Hopefully can last a few more until the compute hardware shortages pass.

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gethly
34 minutes ago
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"back in my day", seagate was "the shit". only much later, hitachi drives came to be popular and wd, sort of.
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