I've been working in IT since 1995! well officially, unoficially it dates back to 1986.
But with RAIDS, since 1997... I've worked with a number of hard disk arrays and vendors, since becoming certified in storage by HP, back in 97 or 98.
Yesterday, a good friend called me with a flash deal. 6x 8TB sata HDD for 600 euro! New!
I was inclined in taking it, but then I decided to make the smart question: Hi Harry, what's the drive brand?
The reply was: Seagate!
And I've passed it! Naturally.
So why!? did Seagate, the makers of some of the best drives I've used back in the ATA and SCSI days?
I work with around 19 RAID at work and 4 at home... all running 24x7... and I've recently been over a simple statistic on hard-drive failures that is just explanatory:
Hard Drive Fail per brand 2.5" and 3.5":
Seagate - 98%
Samsung - 70%
WesternDigital - 3%
Hitachi - 0%
Hard Drive Fail without possible software recovery within 1 week of buying:
Seagate - 90%
Samsung - 0%
WesternDigital - 0%
Hitachi - 0%
Hard Drive Fail within 1 year of buying 24x7 NAS or RAID usage:
Seagate - 8%
Samsung - 60%
WesternDigital - 0%
Hitachi - 0%
Hard Drive Fail over 1Year and suffering a Datacenter cooling failure (one of the best ways to loose the reading head on a hard drive):
Samsung - 10%
WesternDigital - 2%
Hitachi - 0%
Hard Drive Fail on USB hard-drive with over one year and backup-restore with moving between locations :
WesternDigital - 1%
Now comes the conclusion:
Clearly, if you want to sleep at night, you will NOT BUY SEAGATE! Easy One!
But is the drive failure a quality problem or mis-usage?
Well the remaining 2% of hard drives are equals of most the ones that failed, operating under the same circumstances over similar periods... and one of the failed drives is a "Seagate constellation", operating under redundant temperature controlled datacenter, and used for backup, and not high load... so clearly a quality issue.
Today, If Seagate offered me HDs for free, I would just go pay and buy some Hitachi or WesternDigital... hell those, I would even buy second-hand and be cool with it.
Samsung... well let's just stick with silicon as they clearly are better with SSD than mechanical drives... still, they've managed better than the industry giant Seagate.
