Study: A Look At Hard Drive Reliability In Russia

From Tom's HW

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd-reliability-storelab,2681.html

 

 

From Tom's HW

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd-reliability-storelab,2681.html

Very interesting reading.  Thanks.  Since Hitachi was mentioned as having a smaller failure rate than their market share, and Seagate a larger failure rate then their market share, I'll share some SMART statistics on my personal experience with those two brands over many different disk models.   

 

I have 6 Hitachi drives between my two unRAID servers.  Two of them are the original two 500Gig drives I started with:

Hitachi 500Gig Drive #1.  41105 hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Hitachi 500Gig Drive #2.  40975 hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Hitachi 2TB Drives #3  850 hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Hitachi 2TB Drives #4  850 hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Hitachi 2TB Drives #5  850 hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Hitachi 2TB Drives #6  47 hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

 

And 10 Seagate Drives, purchased over the years.

Seagate 1.5TB Drive #1 858 Hours, 1 re-allocated sector.

Seagate 1.5TB Drive #2 14099 Hours, 18 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 1.5TB Drive #3 13653 Hours, 14 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 1TB Drive #4 17539 Hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 400Gig Drive #5 13228 Hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 400Gig drive #6 14480 Hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 400Gig Drive #7 24735 Hours, 6 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 750Gig Drive #8 10053 Hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 750Gig Drive #9 12190 Hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 400Gig Drive #10 23898 Hours, 18 re-allocated sectors.

 

From my personal experience, I'll choose a Hitachi drive over a Seagate drive.

if you read the study NONE of the 200 Hitachi drives in the study failed, they were all broken by users.

I have 6 Hitachi drives between my two unRAID servers.   Two of them are the original two 500Gig drives I started with:

Hitachi 500Gig Drive #1.  41105 hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Hitachi 500Gig Drive #2.  40975 hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Hitachi 2TB Drives #3  850 hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Hitachi 2TB Drives #4  850 hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Hitachi 2TB Drives #5  850 hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Hitachi 2TB Drives #6  47 hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

 

And 10 Seagate Drives, purchased over the years.

Seagate 1.5TB Drive #1 858 Hours, 1 re-allocated sector.

Seagate 1.5TB Drive #2 14099 Hours, 18 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 1.5TB Drive #3 13653 Hours, 14 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 1TB Drive #4 17539 Hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 400Gig Drive #5 13228 Hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 400Gig drive #6 14480 Hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 400Gig Drive #7 24735 Hours, 6 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 750Gig Drive #8 10053 Hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 750Gig Drive #9 12190 Hours, 0 re-allocated sectors.

Seagate 400Gig Drive #10 23898 Hours, 18 re-allocated sectors.

 

From my personal experience, I'll choose a Hitachi drive over a Seagate drive.

 

All disks in my unRAID are either Seagate or WD. From my experience, Seagate does have higher error in the sense of "reallocation sectors" count. one of my 1.5TB Seagate even has reallocated sector count in 44.

 

Seagate usually is aggressively in price war, i think that is the main reason it has bigger market share. however it looks like i will start to pick up some Hitachi drives if price is right, Hitachi usually has higher price compared with Seagate and WD.

I'd like to have seen more on the actual testing methodology of this study, but it kinda tells us what we already seem to know from conventional wisdom and anecdotal evidence:

1. Don't kick your hard drive around

2. Don't bake your hard drive

3. The 7200.11 Seagates seem to have declined in reliability vs the 7200.10

 

I'm tracking 28 hard drives on my home network 500GB or greater dating back to the 2006 time frame, though I didn't start tracking detailed information until 2008.  My records have this:

1. The 6 Seagate 750GB (7200.10) drives I've bought (individually from 2006 into 2007) have been rock solid, are still in use, and have had no need for replacement.  (Since they are older, however, I've migrated them to less critical tasks... right now they support my VMWare home servers where they are backed up but if any one failed it would not be much of a loss to me.)

2. The 1 Western Digital 500GB WD5000YS-01MPB1 I received in Jan 2008 from RMA died in Feb 2010 (don't have records on the original's life & death, but the warranty ended Sep 08... so I might have gotten the original in 2005 before it failed in Jan 2008).

3. From Jul 2008 - Jul 2010 I've bought or acquired (from RMAs) the following:

• 1 Western Digital 1TB WD1001FALS-00J7B0
  
• 1 Seagate 1TB ST31000340AS
  
• 6 Seagate 1.5TB ST31500341AS
  
• 3 Seagate 1TB ST31000528AS
  
• 6 Western Digital 2TB WD20EADS-00R6B0
  
• 2 Seagate 2TB ST32000542AS
  
• 1 Hitachi 2TB HD32000 IDK/7K
  
• 1 Western Digital 2TB WD20EARS-00MVWB0
  

 

Only Seagates have ever suffered a failure to a degree where I have had to replace a drive (4 total):

• Seagate ST31000528AS, bought July 2009, failed Aug 2009... maybe I can blame NewEgg shipping
  
• Seagate ST31500341AS, purchase date unknown, failed Sep 2009 (warranty exp Oct 2013, so that might put the purchase date in the 2008 time frame since these had 5 year warranties at the time)
  
• Seagate ST31000528AS, bought Sep 2009, failed Dec 2009
  
• Seagate ST31500341AS, purchase date unknown, failed Jul 2010 (warranty exp Nov 2013)
  

 

(Since there were 4 RMA's, that means I now have 8 Seagate, 8 WD, and 1 Hitachi in operation that were obtained during the July 2008 - present range.)

 

I currently have one Seagate ST31500341AS on my Windows machine with a SMART health status of 29% according to Acronis Drive Monitor and Hard Disk Sentinel (71 reallocated sectors), and a Seagate ST32000542AS in my unRAID array with 117 reallocated sectors.  I keep drive temps around 31-34C.

 

After the 7200.11 firmware issues, most of my purchases in July 2009 and after have been Western Digital (7 WD, 2 Seagate, 1 Hitachi, plus 3 Seagate coming from RMA).

 

I did just order a 2TB Seagate a couple of days ago thanks to the NewEgg shell shocker, which just goes to show that like most consumer customers I'm a sucker for price and capacity over reliability, just like the Tom's Hardware article says