The ones that had been shipping for a few years. Like many things they all start life the least stable, go through several firmware revisions, maybe a couple of hardware revisions, and then everyone hits about the same level of reliability if they don't change them further.
Yup, last time I've been beaten was with "brand new fresh from the factory new model" 3 TB drives. The crappy firmware failed badly under load and I nearly lost 60 TB. Recent firmwares pose no problem, though.
OTOH 1 and 2 TB from HGST were absolutely rock-solid from the start. Only lost a handful of them among several thousand installed. By contrast in the past years I've had a steady 50% failure rate on Barracuda ES2, the shittiest drive on earth since the legendary 9 GB Micropolis.
Not original poster, but I favor WD over Seagate because lately all Seagate drives we have got (about 20) failed in a couple of months. I have had 2 WD failures this years (about 100 drives in various RAID configs).
Whatever brand ships with HP netbooks is basically a failure waiting to happen (we bought 100 HP netbooks with 3G from Verizon - they are very sick of us calling).
Everyone has their own horror stories about drive manufacturers. I personally had a bunch of WD drives fail a while ago, so I've been hesitant to buy WD. Now, this was 10-ish years ago, so I know reliability has improved, but that doesn't change my hesitation.
It used to be that Maxtor (when they were around and independent) had the most reliable drives. Now, it's who knows...
Maxtor had horrible reputation (by far the worst) among most of my friends and local forums.
Things is, all drive manufacturers have batches and you might end up with 8 dead out of 10 drives for any manufacturer at any given time.
The only thing you can do is try to get drives from different batches and thus trying to minimize having all eggs in one basket (what good is raid6 if all drives die?).
Also when a lot of drives die you should look for other culprits as well, is the temperature OK? Is the power stable? (Vibrations?)
There isn't much statistics available (that I know of) but a french store published their return-rate for drives (which of course doesn't count drives returned directly to the manufacturer)
But all in all, if you have many drives failing you've hit a bad batch or are treating your drives badly, nothing you can do about it (the former at least).
> Also when a lot of drives die you should look for other culprits as well, is the temperature OK? Is the power stable? (Vibrations?)
Also remember the demo from a Sun guy that showed how screaming to your RAID array had a significant impact on IO in real time (it was actually a dtrace demo): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
Someone ( in the storage industry) also told me of some crap RAID enclosure that had a normal performance until you added a drive in the center slot; then some bad vibration resonance kicked in and the performance dropped terribly :)
Right... that's my point. I had a bad experience with WD once upon a time (multiple drives, all different batches). And when I had to build a ~1TB RAID in 2001, all of my research pointed to Maxtor. Side note: That actually turned out to be a good choice. The drives lasted 5+ years and didn't die until a fan gave out in the drive cage. Poor little guys got too hot and seized up. After all of that, I was still able to pull 99.5% of the data off of them.
What I was trying to get at is that looking at any specific case and making any blanket statements about quality of drives. Ask 5 people what are the best and worst drives and you'll get 5 different answers. We all have horror stories. The only way to know for sure is to have actual population-level data on reliability. Unfortunately, that data is somewhat hard to come by, so we all just rely on anecdotal stories.
It also depends on if we are talking consumer drives, enterprise drives, etc... I doubt that the return rate for drives would actually cover serious data errors which occurred after the return timeframe.
Honestly, the only people who could offer any insight are the large companies with huge datacenters: Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Rackspace, etc... and I doubt you'll hear them talking. If you could, I suspect the answer would be that it really doesn't matter which manufacturer you choose. All of them fail. All of them have bad batches. The best that you can do is try to minimize the MTBF and try to gracefully replace failed drives as soon as possible.
Honestly, the only people who could offer any insight are the large companies with huge datacenters
Yup, this gives you good insights into the 'current' crop. We've got about 15,000 drives in our Santa Clara data center at Blekko (mostly enterprise SATA, 2TB (WD), but some 1TB (Seagate) too) In large populations like that I prefer to keep one family, which I know folks decry a monoculture but that keeps the failure rate more consistent across all drives which helps manage replacing them.
I have an interest in this and am trying to build up a disk survey system to try and learn about this in the open, it's still not up yet but you can subscribe for an announcement and read some thoughts at http://disksurvey.org/
