Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015

Gondolinian

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My above comment was poorly written. Sorry. Hem.

Consumer-grade HDD's, used properly, all have about same, low failure rate. If you treat your desktop like a NAS or server, they will drop like flies (as evidenced). If you treat your desktop like a desktop, then a lot of the price-raising enterprise-grade features (vibration resistance, 24/7 operation) count for zilch. They're still higher-end drives, and will last longer, but assuming you give your desktop a fraction of the maintenance you give your car (like, take 5 minutes to blow it out every other year), not a lot.

Assumption not in evidence.

Mea culpa. I'll give you heat, but vibration tolerance and 24/7 operation are enterprise-grade features with minimal relevance to desktop hard drives. Evidence. Evidence. Why I'm inclined to distrust anything Backblaze publishes + evidence.

tl;dr Looking at this data and concluding "avoid Seagate Barracuda drives" is a bit like noticing that bikers survive accidents more often when they're wearing a helmet and then issuing a blanket recommendation to a population primarily of car-drivers to wear bike helmets. Sure, it'll reduce your expecting mortality when you go out for a drive, but not nearly as much as you'd expect from the biking numbers.

Consumer-grade HDD's, used properly, all have about same, low failure rate. If you treat your desktop like a NAS or server, they will drop like flies (as evidenced).

Sigh. No. Really, go look at the data. I am not going to take the "consensus" of the anand crowd over it.

Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 is a consumer-grade non-enterprise hard drive. In the sample of ~4,600 drives it has 1.1% annual failure rate in the NAS environment.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 is a consumer-grade non-enterprise hard drive. In the sample of ~1,200 drives it has 43.1% annua... (read more)