[Scramblejams]

Thanks for posting this data! I love it!

I appreciate your diplomatic language, but the time to failure does matter, and consumers don’t have the same cost structure that incentivizes replacing working drives the way you do.

FWIW I share GP’s experience with Seagate. I had quite a few of them, ranging in size from 500 gigs to 2TB. Every last one of them died relatively quickly, while most of my Hitachis, Toshibas, and WDs from that era still work.

Seagate earned a permanent boycott from this customer.

[beatgammit]

This data isn't particularly useful in more ways than that because there are a lot of variables that differ between running in a data center vs desktop/home NAS. I like reading these data because it's interesting to me, but I make purchasing decisions based on other sources, usually in terms of ease of dealing with support for end customers (when I need a drive replaced), noise (it's in my house), heat sensitivity (my house is warmer than a data center), and sensitivity to things like vibration (my case is far less stable than enterprise storage clusters).

That being said, I occasionally use these data to break ties or see variations between generations of drives.

[cheeze]

WD isn't much better, but Backblaze stats have consistently shown Seagate to be higher failure rate than everybody else out there.

Good riddance.

[inferiorhuman]

I just purchased a newer WD Red (WD80EFAX) to replace an older HGST (pre-WD if memory serves) drive. That drive (and another of the same model I purchased elsewhere to test) is not recognized by the UEFI on the motherboard. The OS probes the drive and fails to negotiate DMA transfers.

Turns out there is a publicly available KB article that mentions known bugs with transfer rate negotiation on some of their SATA3 drives. Of course WD won't say which drives. There's even a utility referenced in the article that you can use to disable SATA3 support. But WD won't make it publicly utility.

Meanwhile their support is stuck in a "have you tried power cycling the computer" loop.

If memory serves Western Digital / HGST / SanDisk were among the first to jack up prices after the Thailand disasters. Fuck em.

Meanwhile is the difference in failure rate between Seagate and Western Digital even statistically significant? For most comparisons you're looking at a fraction of a percent.

[vorticalbox]

As noted above all driver will fail, though I get your point I think saying that seagate driver time to fail is lower is a fairer statement.