Hardware

Very interesting.

One for the pros here...

Hard Drive Failure Rates: The Results from 68,813 Hard Drives

Wow!!! I'm a bit stunned by this.

I've always regarded Western Digital (WDC) as one of the best brands but perhaps they are now about the worst. However, the best performing (in terms of failures) here is HGST which is wholly owned by Western Digital!!! Eh???

What the heck goes on?

I've noticed that these are consumer-class drives, not server-class. I can't remember the last time WD was considered a reliable brand? Back when drives came with defect lists, perhaps. Cheap and cheerful has been WD's strategy, and while it's worked for them, it's also given them a black mark. You can get better from WD if you're willing to pay -- but who would? Given that, I'm not surprised WD bought Hitachi. They needed better drives and a better name, and HGST -- Hitachi -- has been excellent for a long time. Though they have their dark times too, remember the IBM Deathstar? (I'd almost forgotten they were responsible for that...)

That said -- drive reliability went down steadily once capacities exploded into the dozens then hundreds and thousands of gigabytes. The drive industry chopped their warranties from 3 to 1 years long ago to reflect this, they're inevitably more sensitive devices. The number of spare sectors a modern hard drive keeps -- the percentage of sectors which can die and not be considered a fault -- is disturbing.

Beginning of the nineties, when the Caviar was way ahead of the competition. That was, before they sold their SCSI chips to Future Domain (which was later bought by Adaptec) sometimes mid-nineties.

bakunin