Hard drive Failure Rates
- Thread starter Bozo
- Start date
$165/drive total shipped from newegg. Their sale ended last night with a limit of 5...so that's why I bought 5. I need 3 more for my build. Normal price is $185. I hope newegg packages them better. Amazon wanted the $185 + tax so I figured I'd roll the dice and take a chance on the savings from newegg.
Over the course of a month, the Seagate and Hitachi drives both seem to go on sale for at least one week at both Amazon and Newegg, but limit 2 and limit 5 are both very common.
Just play a waiting game and you'll get your setup working sooner or later.
What platform are you planning to use with ZFS?
Just play a waiting game and you'll get your setup working sooner or later.
What platform are you planning to use with ZFS?
That's kind of what I figured. Some deal will come around again and I can just add on to my ZFS pool over time.
I just mentioned to SD in another thread that I went with a Supermicro X10SL7-F motherboard with an onboard 8 port LSI 2308 that I'll use in IT mode. I'll run ZFS on a flavor of Linux...not yet sure which distro. I paired the motherboard with an Intel Xeon E3 1270 v3 as a newegg package deal ($65 off combined). I ordered 16GB RAM (2x 8GB) for now and will likely bump it to 32GB. I plan to use two SSDs mirrored for L2ARC & ZIL but haven't decided yet on the parts I want to use for this. I'm still trying to decide what case to go with to hold everything. I read mixed reviews on the Norco cases and the Supermicro cases are 2x the cost but seem pretty nice.
I just mentioned to SD in another thread that I went with a Supermicro X10SL7-F motherboard with an onboard 8 port LSI 2308 that I'll use in IT mode. I'll run ZFS on a flavor of Linux...not yet sure which distro. I paired the motherboard with an Intel Xeon E3 1270 v3 as a newegg package deal ($65 off combined). I ordered 16GB RAM (2x 8GB) for now and will likely bump it to 32GB. I plan to use two SSDs mirrored for L2ARC & ZIL but haven't decided yet on the parts I want to use for this. I'm still trying to decide what case to go with to hold everything. I read mixed reviews on the Norco cases and the Supermicro cases are 2x the cost but seem pretty nice.
I missed that coupon code but now they have another coupon for $20 off (EMCPAGP55) limit 5 on the same HGST NAS 4TB drives.
More data from Backblaze (via ArsTechnica).
TL;DR summary: HGST rules, Seagate drools.
TL;DR summary: HGST rules, Seagate drools.
I believe that they historically buy in sufficient volume that they're more concerned with getting a certain number of spindles of a certain capacity at a time rather than any other characteristic or metric. They buy whatever their logistics can give them. During the storage crisis after the floods in Singapore, they were actually to the point of buying up all the high capacity external drives they could find in retail outlets because those were by that point the only drives they could get at a reasonable price. Clearly, they aren't picky.
These guys also say they've had better luck with Deskstar drives than Ultrastars, so it's not that they aren't buying enterprise drives at all.
These guys also say they've had better luck with Deskstar drives than Ultrastars, so it's not that they aren't buying enterprise drives at all.
After wasting a lot of hours trying to find the truth, I think this is mostly true: the designs for the legacy HGST desktop models passed to Toshiba, along with the factories. Toshiba also received enough IP to be able to design (or complete a design for) new 5TB and 6TB drives, which are now available. The Toshiba-branded models are reported to be quieter, but that may be just a normal incremental product improvement.
In contrast, I've noticed that HGST seems to be concentrating on "NAS" drives and "Enterprise" drives (Ultrastar). Presumably, these are newer designs that HGST kept for themselves - note that the exact details of the 3-way agreement have not been publicly revealed.
I suspect that the public perception of WD swallowing a struggling HGST are almost the inverse of the reality. Looking at products rather than sales, it now appears that HGST had far superior 2.5" designs, more reliable 3.5" designs and new ultra-high capacity designs that successfully leveraged exotic technologies. Note that despite the much smaller size of HGST, their CEO became WD's president and COO. A year later, he was given full control of WD as CEO and appointed his own people to executive positions. HGST has been allowed to trade independently of WD, an unusual outcome in this situation.
In contrast, I've noticed that HGST seems to be concentrating on "NAS" drives and "Enterprise" drives (Ultrastar). Presumably, these are newer designs that HGST kept for themselves - note that the exact details of the 3-way agreement have not been publicly revealed.
I suspect that the public perception of WD swallowing a struggling HGST are almost the inverse of the reality. Looking at products rather than sales, it now appears that HGST had far superior 2.5" designs, more reliable 3.5" designs and new ultra-high capacity designs that successfully leveraged exotic technologies. Note that despite the much smaller size of HGST, their CEO became WD's president and COO. A year later, he was given full control of WD as CEO and appointed his own people to executive positions. HGST has been allowed to trade independently of WD, an unusual outcome in this situation.
The write ups I read a while back indicated that WD had to "give" the 3.5" drive portion of the business to Toshiba in order for regulators to approve the WD/HGST merger/acquisition. If that's the case I don't think they would be able to keep any portion of HGST's 3.5" drives or designs. That would point to the HGST drive being relabeled WD drives targeted at a different market segment.
I did a little investigation after reading about HGST here and also couldn't determine if they're made by WD or not. Even if they are, BackBlaze seems to have good luck with their 4TB drives in the environment they run them in. I'm hoping mine hold up as well as BB has reported.
If you read the comments on the BackBlaze article, one of the employees of the blog indicated in a few weeks they will publish the raw data from their statistics which means more analysts can be done (assuming their data is complete). One post suggested their database of info was over 3GB.
If you read the comments on the BackBlaze article, one of the employees of the blog indicated in a few weeks they will publish the raw data from their statistics which means more analysts can be done (assuming their data is complete). One post suggested their database of info was over 3GB.
Here's the latest update.
They ditched the one problematic Seagate 3TB drive model. WD looks like it's generally unimpressive now. Those HGSTs though. Wow.
They ditched the one problematic Seagate 3TB drive model. WD looks like it's generally unimpressive now. Those HGSTs though. Wow.