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

Gondolinian

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People are perennially interested in the reliability of hard drives. Here is useful hard data. Summary:

At Backblaze, as of December 31, 2014, we had 41,213 disk drives spinning in our data center, storing all of the data for our unlimited backup service. That is up from 27,134 at the end of 2013. ... The table below shows the annual failure rate through the year 2014.

tl;dr Avoid 3Tb Seagate Barracuda drives.

I spend time in hardware enthusiast communities and not so impressed with Backblaze. Even here, the Seagate failure rates seem suspiciously anomalous.

Also, SSDs, which are probably a better match for most people here (my rig has run a 256 GB SSD for the past 2.5 years and I'm yet to want for more storage). Especially for laptops; they use less power (= your battery lasts longer) and can stand up to shock (so your laptop doesn't break if you drop it).

0Nornagest11y

I've found that modern hard drives tend to be quite reliable for consumer purposes; we've come a long way since the bad old days of the Click of Doom. Their enclosures, not so much. I've had three backplanes for external hard drives, from three different manufacturers, fail in as many years. And one cable. But that table won't give you any information on how common this sort of thing is or how to mitigate your risk.