AFR is a percentage, 1 drive from a pool of 10 means 10%, 5 drives from 100 means 5%; so with regards to your point that they don’t have much WD drives, if they don’t have much WD, then each fail is even more detrimental on the chart, therefore making the data even more impactful. The data also showed the average across all manufactures and you can see clearly Seagate being consistently above the average quarter over quarter. The failure rate is annualized, so age of drive is also factored into the consideration.
When there’s a clear trend of higher failure rate represented as a percentage, I’m not going to volunteer my data, NAS or otherwise, as tribute to brand loyalty from a manufacture that’s gone downhill from the decades past.
The failure rate is annualized, so age of drive is also factored into the consideration.
Sort of. If we’re mostly seeing failures during the first year or two and high average age, that means their QC is terrible, but that’s something a consumer can work with by burning in drives. If average age is lower, that means drives are probably failing further into their life, which means a burn-in won’t likely detect the worst of it.
If Seagate were so unreliable, why would Backblaze be using so much of them? They used to use cheap consumer drives in the past, but if you look at the drives they have in service, they’re pretty much all enterprise class drives, so it’s not like they’re abusing customer warranties or anything.
While the top two companies of Enterprise HDDs were close in all categories, Seagate has proven itself a leader by being voted Market for the seventh year in a row; also picking up titles for Price, Performance, Reliability, Innovation, and Service and Support, sweeping the board for a two-year streak. Western Digital came in second for all categories trailed by Toshiba.
Backblaze places Toshiba as first for reliability, whereas this survey put them third.
Why the discrepancy? Idk, but there’s a good chance Backblaze is doing something wonky in their reporting, or they have significantly different environmental factors in their datacenters or something than average. Or maybe they’re not burning in their drives (or counting those as failures) and other IT pros are (and not counting those as failures). Maybe their goal is to reduce demand so they can get the drives cheaper. I really don’t know.
I’m not going to tell you what you should buy. I personally have WD drives in my NAS because I got a decent price for them years ago, but I wouldn’t hesitate to put Seagate drives in there either. Regardless, I’m going to test the drives when I get them.
It is pretty clear that you have less of an inclination against Seagate than my experience dictates me to. Stats can be twisted to tell anything, and my twist on what I’m seeing tells me to steer away from Seagate; your interpretation can most certainly differ.
AFR is a percentage, 1 drive from a pool of 10 means 10%, 5 drives from 100 means 5%; so with regards to your point that they don’t have much WD drives, if they don’t have much WD, then each fail is even more detrimental on the chart, therefore making the data even more impactful. The data also showed the average across all manufactures and you can see clearly Seagate being consistently above the average quarter over quarter. The failure rate is annualized, so age of drive is also factored into the consideration.
When there’s a clear trend of higher failure rate represented as a percentage, I’m not going to volunteer my data, NAS or otherwise, as tribute to brand loyalty from a manufacture that’s gone downhill from the decades past.
Sort of. If we’re mostly seeing failures during the first year or two and high average age, that means their QC is terrible, but that’s something a consumer can work with by burning in drives. If average age is lower, that means drives are probably failing further into their life, which means a burn-in won’t likely detect the worst of it.
If Seagate were so unreliable, why would Backblaze be using so much of them? They used to use cheap consumer drives in the past, but if you look at the drives they have in service, they’re pretty much all enterprise class drives, so it’s not like they’re abusing customer warranties or anything.
Here’s a survey of IT pros from 2019, which gives Seagate the award for every single category for Enterprise HDDs:
Backblaze places Toshiba as first for reliability, whereas this survey put them third.
Why the discrepancy? Idk, but there’s a good chance Backblaze is doing something wonky in their reporting, or they have significantly different environmental factors in their datacenters or something than average. Or maybe they’re not burning in their drives (or counting those as failures) and other IT pros are (and not counting those as failures). Maybe their goal is to reduce demand so they can get the drives cheaper. I really don’t know.
I’m not going to tell you what you should buy. I personally have WD drives in my NAS because I got a decent price for them years ago, but I wouldn’t hesitate to put Seagate drives in there either. Regardless, I’m going to test the drives when I get them.
It is pretty clear that you have less of an inclination against Seagate than my experience dictates me to. Stats can be twisted to tell anything, and my twist on what I’m seeing tells me to steer away from Seagate; your interpretation can most certainly differ.
Exactly. My argument here is to be careful with published stats, because they’re easy to misinterpret, and they’re also easy to misrepresent.
Backblaze’s data is good, just be careful when making conclusions based on it.