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OT – Hard drive failure rates.
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LaCie definitely had some power supply problems and was replacing a lot of the D2 external PS units. I’ve never had a problem, though I have several, some 250 and 500GB that must be 5 years old. Now used just for backup though. Get mostly drives through OWC, Hitachi, now HGST and Toshiba. Some HGST failures.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1, Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Pro X 10.1.4, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.5, Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K, Blackmagic Teranex, Avid MC, 2013 Mac Pro Hexacore, 1 TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 2-D500: 2012 Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-285 120GB SSD, Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 16GB RAM 250GB SSD -
Lately Lacie, Promise and GTech have all been pretty solid for me.
Noah
FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
Call Box Training -
I see a few people in this thread mentioning what brands have failed on them in that past, which they now avoid. Every hard drive you buy will fail eventually; it’s a matter of when, not if. In the long term, you won’t have any storage vendors left to buy from.
Also, any vendor could be susceptible to the kinds of component batch failures we see affecting Seagate and LaCie in the future . Buying from someone else means fighting battles already won — or lost! — and is no guarantee on future performance.
Assume your primary storage will fail and have a backup strategy in place to mitigate your risk.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “Assume your primary storage will fail and have a backup strategy in place to mitigate your risk.”
While that is always the correct strategy, I linked that study because it is not personal or anecdotal. Backblaze, as you know because you tipped me off to them, buys hundreds and thousands of drives per year and is unique in that they are willing to share their experience in evaluating them. And while it’s true that “best” is a fluid sobriquet, when you see the stats on Seagate’s 3TB barracuda drives, it’s simply prudent to avoid them and helpful to mention this to others. I also think that the knowledge of the industry wide superiority of 4tb drives to 3tb drives is worth noting. Of course this won’t help you too much if you buy a Hitachi drive and it goes down on you, as they sometimes do, but then again 10 years ago I bought a Subaru that was a lemon — someone has to be in that 1%.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Herb Sevush] “I linked that study because it is not personal or anecdotal. Backblaze, as you know because you tipped me off to them, buys hundreds and thousands of drives per year and is unique in that they are willing to share their experience in evaluating them.”
Absolutely, and I’m all for empiricism. But these studies are necessarily backwards-looking. Like finance, past results are no guarantee of future performance.
It’s easy to know what drives you should have bought last year, but harder to know what new drives you should buy next. I don’t know enough Inside Baseball on storage to know when manufacturers change their process, or components, or the firmware on their drives, or any other factor that may reverse the findings here. Hitachi (via IBM) is a darling today, but they used to make a drive called the DeskStar that was so bad it was called the DeathStar. Who did we flock to then? Seagate.
That said, I’m with you. I’m buying Hitachi drives and Samsung SSDs now myself, based in large part on studies like this. But eventually, something will change in manufacturing, empiricism will become superstition, and I’ll have bought the wrong drives. (See also: my collection of 1.5TB Seagates.)
No matter what brand you buy, you should treat it like a Seagate drive in a LaCie enclosure designed by Ford Pinto engineers with a power supply that Jaguar built in the 80s.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “No matter what brand you buy, you should treat it like a Seagate drive in a LaCie enclosure designed by Ford Pinto engineers with a power supply that Jaguar built in the 80s.”
Words to live by. Nice.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
this was an interesting article, and an interesting thread. My have used Seagate my entire career (because that’s what AVID used since day 1, until things changed). In 2009, I built two large drive arrays with Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM drives, and had non stop failures. We blamed everyone in the food chain (because how could Seagate be bad) and ATTO, JMR, and Small Tree all said DONT USE SEAGATE DRIVES.
We switched to Hitachi (HGST) and never looked back. I have since occationally used Seagate drives, with usually poor performance. Some people, like Tim Jones from Tolis Group swears by the Seagate Constallations and says that they are currently the best drive.
And one name that is not mentioned here is Toshiba, who makes cheap drives, that I have not personally seen fail, but certainly gets bad reviews.
When people have their comments about Cal Digit, Lacie, G-Tech, etc. these companies DO NOT MAKE DISK DRIVES. They put drives from Seagate, WD and HGST into their boxes. People can say “well, I buy Cal Digit, and I trust them” – they have NO IDEA of what drives are in these boxes, and its usually the drive (and occationaly the power supply) that fail, not the metal enclosure. For the record – HGST owns G-Tech (which is all owned by WD).
And with all of that said, drives suck, and they all fail. Particularly in hi speed, hi performance RAID arrays. People that do RAID 0 are just crazy. That’s when I laugh when I see performance specs of thunderbolt RAID arrays doing 1300 MB/sec – you can only do this at RAID 0, and you just have an accident waiting to happen. You must use RAID protection, and you must backup your data, because disaster WILL happen – it’s only a matter of time. People say “well, which are the good drives” – there are no good drives, just ones that are a little more reliable than the others, but they will all fail. I use HGST Deskstar NA, HGST Ultrastar Enterprise, WD RE series, and WD RED NAS drives, depending on cost and application. But everyone one of these drives (including HGST Ultrastar enterprise drives) fail – if you don’t back up, it’s your own damn fault.
Bob zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com
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