Some important points since you're directly comparing to the WD Red line... The WD Red Pro drives come with a 5-year warranty, and do indeed top out at 4 TB, for the moment. The WD Red line comes with a 3-year warranty, and includes drives up to 6 TB.
Considering the Backblaze failure rate data, Seagate had better steeply discount their products if they want people to consider them over HGST or WD drives.
With an annual failure rate 2-3x that of WD (and 10x that of Hitachi), Seagate buyers are significantly more likely to NEED that data recovery service, too. So it's not like the bundled software is a kind an unnecessary gift from Seagate to its customers.
If your only source is that Backblaze study, you should take it with a grain of salt. This study by a major French electronics retailer doesn't support that conclusion.
Although I do appriciate the backblaze study, they make it CLEAR their failure rates for all the drives ranked are for a SPECIFIC application, one that none of the drives are designed for (these are consumer drives running in a cold-storage scenerio among other drives in RAID.) Almost none of those drives have firmware that supports staggared spinup, vibration monitoring, harmonic balancing, differential queuing, and so on.
To the point: Seagate consumer drives since the 7200.10-12 up to the Cuda' XT have very aggressive head parking (called load cycles) and they are rated at 250,000-500,000 load/unloads. I've seen drives rack up 90,000+ load/unloads in months if you use them for heavy access (seeding torrents.) NAS\RAID drives have firmware that often completely disables head parking (smart powersaving parameter 0xC1:255)
The reason the Hitachi drives do so well in the Backblaze study is because Hitachi never even implemented the SMART 0xC1 command.
The reason WD drives do slightly better than the Seagates probably has to do with them having a dual-axis motor shaft mount on most of their 7200RPM drives (all models except Green) which helps with harmonic vibrations when they're in a pod with 160 drives.
Then you take into account the firmware on Seagate's 7200.10 and 7200.11 drives, particularely the models with 333GB platters (5) had that nasty firmware bug (famous in the 1.5TB model) had a "fairly high" failure rate on its own. So it's no surprise to see those drives failing a lot in their pods when there are multiple angles for failure.
Overall, I think it's pretty well understood Hitachi made some of the best consumer drives in recent years, and lets just hold WD uses some of that engineering pixi dust in their future drives as the deskstar goes the way of the dodo. These aren't the 75GXP's from yesteryear, the Deskstar 7K3000 was one of the best consumer drives since the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7.
These days I'm a particular WD fan, but I really like Seagates approach with the SSHD hybrid drive. That's a great solution for single-disk computers and family PC's where you want a single drive for simplicity with an SSD responsiveness edge.
the reason the failure's are higher is because seagate sells waaayyy more drives than any of the others. I would go as far to say, seagate sells more drives than the other 3 top competitors combined.
In 18 months since purchase, - 2 of the 3 Seagate Barracuda Drives (3TB) have failed - 2 WD Red drive have failed All in a Synology NAS. I will steer clear of Seagate in future!
Oh no, for the above I meant to say: In 18 months since purchase, - 2 of the 3 Seagate Barracuda Drives (3TB) have failed - 0 of the 2 WD Red drives have failed All in a Synology NAS. I will steer clear of Seagate in future!
Morawka, we are talking failure RATE which means the rate at which any single drive will fail. This data is adjusted for number of drives in the market (i.e. a failure rate of 1/100, means 1 out of 100 will die, which is still the same weather there are 100 drives in consumer hands or 1 million, 1 out of 100 will die...).
Also, the Backblaze studies are based on thousands of drives, again, adjusted for numbers owned, even down to the firmware version in many cases. It is some very good data, but as has been pointed out, it is good for their use case. That said, it is a very good torture test for a drive, and really does show the differences in the consumer class drives operating 24x7 under load (sometimes very heavy load).
If you're buying large quantities of drives to put in arrays, you really shouldn't be needing 3rd party data recovery services for individual drives. If a drive fails, you simply yank it and rebuild the array, and if the array goes down, you recover from backup.
If you're not using arrays with backups, why are you buying an enterprise NAS drive in the first place?
To be fair, Backblaze is using regular desktop drives in environments they were not designed for: high vibration from 40+ drives in a pod. The results of that study are surely valid if you use the drives in such an environment.. but they don't necessarily apply to other environments.
Think about it: if Seagate drives were really failing at these rates in the wild, HGST and WD would already have taken over the market. And they put the RV (rotational vibration) sensors in the modles for more drive bays for a good reason.
The backblaze data also mentioned Seagate AND WD 5400 RPM drives that routinely failed nearly instantly. There's a lot of evidence that supports their environment is not suited towards certain drives. I don't think the average consumer should put much, if any, weight on those results. If it was routine for Seagate to have return rates at a multiple of competitors in normal application, then they'd be in big trouble selling to people like Dell, HP, etc...
I actually haven't seen a modern crashed hard disk in awhile. I think the last drive I came across that actually failed from a head crash was a WD Blue 500GB OEM in an HP, sometime in 2013.
Laptop drives are another story. I come across near-dead 2.5" drives monthly. I take the opportunity to always replace it with an SSD. It'd be borderline unethical to do otherwise.
All drives fail. All manufacturers go through bad batches. I recently had to throw away a 2TB WD drive that was out of warranty. I've had Hitachi drives go bad. Seagate, Samsung and Maxtor too. But I learned long ago to back up my data. I'm working on a second set of backups, but that is expensive. I am 2/3rd of the way there. All about money for me and my expensive hobby.
These drives are clearly different from the regular NAS versions. There's the higher spindle speed, higher rated durability, vibration compensation and longer warrenty. The "Enterprise capacity" has this as well, but also some more features which someone may not need. If the "Enterprise NAS" is cheaper than "Enterprise capacity" this is clearly more than marketing.
The firmware alone could make these drives infinitely more reliable in certain scenario's desktop firmware wasn't engineered for. Even if its the same drive mechanically (which it isn't) they can still legitimately sell it as a superior product for a different application. Look at WD's Purple/Red drives, which are basically Green's with tweaked firmware and added sensors, or the Red Pro, which are basically Black drives with modified "RE" firmware.
It's beginning to seem to me that Seagate and WD only actually make 3 different types of 3.5" HD with varying numbers of platters for different capacities. The only other difference between models is marketing, which seems to have gone into overdrive trying to create differentiation where none exists. From a hardware perspective what actually makes this "new" product different? It just seems like more of the same.
Yeah, the basic mechanics don't differ all that much. However, there's also firmware differentiation. Which I think should simply be user-switchable rather than an intrinsic HDD property. Or even better: the drive could keep a history and decide itself which behaviour is best suited for the current workload.
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Ditiris - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Some important points since you're directly comparing to the WD Red line... The WD Red Pro drives come with a 5-year warranty, and do indeed top out at 4 TB, for the moment. The WD Red line comes with a 3-year warranty, and includes drives up to 6 TB.Considering the Backblaze failure rate data, Seagate had better steeply discount their products if they want people to consider them over HGST or WD drives.
takeshi7 - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
At least the Seagate drives come bundled with a data recovery service if they fail. WD doesn't offer anything like that.Black Obsidian - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
With an annual failure rate 2-3x that of WD (and 10x that of Hitachi), Seagate buyers are significantly more likely to NEED that data recovery service, too. So it's not like the bundled software is a kind an unnecessary gift from Seagate to its customers.takeshi7 - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
If your only source is that Backblaze study, you should take it with a grain of salt. This study by a major French electronics retailer doesn't support that conclusion.http://www.hardware.fr/articles/893-6/disques-durs...
Samus - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Although I do appriciate the backblaze study, they make it CLEAR their failure rates for all the drives ranked are for a SPECIFIC application, one that none of the drives are designed for (these are consumer drives running in a cold-storage scenerio among other drives in RAID.) Almost none of those drives have firmware that supports staggared spinup, vibration monitoring, harmonic balancing, differential queuing, and so on.To the point: Seagate consumer drives since the 7200.10-12 up to the Cuda' XT have very aggressive head parking (called load cycles) and they are rated at 250,000-500,000 load/unloads. I've seen drives rack up 90,000+ load/unloads in months if you use them for heavy access (seeding torrents.) NAS\RAID drives have firmware that often completely disables head parking (smart powersaving parameter 0xC1:255)
The reason the Hitachi drives do so well in the Backblaze study is because Hitachi never even implemented the SMART 0xC1 command.
The reason WD drives do slightly better than the Seagates probably has to do with them having a dual-axis motor shaft mount on most of their 7200RPM drives (all models except Green) which helps with harmonic vibrations when they're in a pod with 160 drives.
Then you take into account the firmware on Seagate's 7200.10 and 7200.11 drives, particularely the models with 333GB platters (5) had that nasty firmware bug (famous in the 1.5TB model) had a "fairly high" failure rate on its own. So it's no surprise to see those drives failing a lot in their pods when there are multiple angles for failure.
Overall, I think it's pretty well understood Hitachi made some of the best consumer drives in recent years, and lets just hold WD uses some of that engineering pixi dust in their future drives as the deskstar goes the way of the dodo. These aren't the 75GXP's from yesteryear, the Deskstar 7K3000 was one of the best consumer drives since the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7.
These days I'm a particular WD fan, but I really like Seagates approach with the SSHD hybrid drive. That's a great solution for single-disk computers and family PC's where you want a single drive for simplicity with an SSD responsiveness edge.
Morawka - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
the reason the failure's are higher is because seagate sells waaayyy more drives than any of the others. I would go as far to say, seagate sells more drives than the other 3 top competitors combined.THazard - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
In 18 months since purchase,- 2 of the 3 Seagate Barracuda Drives (3TB) have failed
- 2 WD Red drive have failed
All in a Synology NAS. I will steer clear of Seagate in future!
THazard - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
Oh no, for the above I meant to say:In 18 months since purchase,
- 2 of the 3 Seagate Barracuda Drives (3TB) have failed
- 0 of the 2 WD Red drives have failed
All in a Synology NAS. I will steer clear of Seagate in future!
Fallen Kell - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Morawka, we are talking failure RATE which means the rate at which any single drive will fail. This data is adjusted for number of drives in the market (i.e. a failure rate of 1/100, means 1 out of 100 will die, which is still the same weather there are 100 drives in consumer hands or 1 million, 1 out of 100 will die...).Fallen Kell - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Also, the Backblaze studies are based on thousands of drives, again, adjusted for numbers owned, even down to the firmware version in many cases. It is some very good data, but as has been pointed out, it is good for their use case. That said, it is a very good torture test for a drive, and really does show the differences in the consumer class drives operating 24x7 under load (sometimes very heavy load).Gigaplex - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
If you're buying large quantities of drives to put in arrays, you really shouldn't be needing 3rd party data recovery services for individual drives. If a drive fails, you simply yank it and rebuild the array, and if the array goes down, you recover from backup.If you're not using arrays with backups, why are you buying an enterprise NAS drive in the first place?
buternutz - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
^^^The most accurate comment in this thread^^MrSpadge - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
To be fair, Backblaze is using regular desktop drives in environments they were not designed for: high vibration from 40+ drives in a pod. The results of that study are surely valid if you use the drives in such an environment.. but they don't necessarily apply to other environments.Think about it: if Seagate drives were really failing at these rates in the wild, HGST and WD would already have taken over the market. And they put the RV (rotational vibration) sensors in the modles for more drive bays for a good reason.
Concillian - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
The backblaze data also mentioned Seagate AND WD 5400 RPM drives that routinely failed nearly instantly. There's a lot of evidence that supports their environment is not suited towards certain drives. I don't think the average consumer should put much, if any, weight on those results. If it was routine for Seagate to have return rates at a multiple of competitors in normal application, then they'd be in big trouble selling to people like Dell, HP, etc...Samus - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
I actually haven't seen a modern crashed hard disk in awhile. I think the last drive I came across that actually failed from a head crash was a WD Blue 500GB OEM in an HP, sometime in 2013.Laptop drives are another story. I come across near-dead 2.5" drives monthly. I take the opportunity to always replace it with an SSD. It'd be borderline unethical to do otherwise.
bigboxes - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
All drives fail. All manufacturers go through bad batches. I recently had to throw away a 2TB WD drive that was out of warranty. I've had Hitachi drives go bad. Seagate, Samsung and Maxtor too. But I learned long ago to back up my data. I'm working on a second set of backups, but that is expensive. I am 2/3rd of the way there. All about money for me and my expensive hobby.ivan256 - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
So they're trying to get a few more bucks out of the SMB market without eating into their nearline margins...This is purely a marketing launch.
MrSpadge - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
These drives are clearly different from the regular NAS versions. There's the higher spindle speed, higher rated durability, vibration compensation and longer warrenty. The "Enterprise capacity" has this as well, but also some more features which someone may not need. If the "Enterprise NAS" is cheaper than "Enterprise capacity" this is clearly more than marketing.SunLord - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Nearline supports SAS and has hardware support for full disk self encryptionSamus - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
The firmware alone could make these drives infinitely more reliable in certain scenario's desktop firmware wasn't engineered for. Even if its the same drive mechanically (which it isn't) they can still legitimately sell it as a superior product for a different application. Look at WD's Purple/Red drives, which are basically Green's with tweaked firmware and added sensors, or the Red Pro, which are basically Black drives with modified "RE" firmware.Flunk - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
It's beginning to seem to me that Seagate and WD only actually make 3 different types of 3.5" HD with varying numbers of platters for different capacities. The only other difference between models is marketing, which seems to have gone into overdrive trying to create differentiation where none exists. From a hardware perspective what actually makes this "new" product different? It just seems like more of the same.MrSpadge - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Yeah, the basic mechanics don't differ all that much. However, there's also firmware differentiation. Which I think should simply be user-switchable rather than an intrinsic HDD property. Or even better: the drive could keep a history and decide itself which behaviour is best suited for the current workload.