German Seagate customers say their 'new' hard drives were actually used – resold HDDs reportedly used for tens of thousands of hours

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Fucking people are wild.

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At least they aren't paving stones

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A bit less than 20 years ago a new PC arrived in our home, and some of the letters on the drive inside it said "Seagate Barracuda". And that drive lasted longer than the motherboard in that box (and the CPU's integrated graphics started gradually failing a few years before that, so I was using a cheap discrete card).

Point is, I have good associations with the brand, sad that it's become this bad.

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Way back when SSD were prohibitively expensive for poor student me way back when, they came up with Momentus XT; I don’t know if they were the first hybrid HDD/SSD, but it was my first foray into flash storage. I had the earlier version with controller such that should the flash memory dies, I’d still have access to the HDD.

It, was, glorious…

I hear you. The brand is really not what we remembered them to be.

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If you look at the data, Seagate is also some of their oldest drives, and some of their most used. Likewise, they have almost no WD drives, yet that's what you recommend below.

I'm not saying you should or should not buy Seagate drives, I'm just saying that's not what you should be taking away from that data. What it seems to say is that Seagate drives are more likely to fail early, and if they don't, they'll likely last a while, even in a use case like Backblaze. Some capacities should be also avoided.

That said, I don't think this data is applicable to an average home user. If you're running a NAS 24/7, maybe, but if you're looking for a single desktop drive (esp if it's solid state), it's useless to you because you won't be buying those models (though failure rates by capacity apply since they likely use the same platters).

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Yes, buy NAS or enterprise drives for a NAS, don't buy consumer drives.

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In my home server my Seagates have been dying one after another, I have replaced each failed one with a Toshiba and they have been rock solid so far

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Yeah, we did that at my last company to make sure our hardware was up to spec. We deployed an IOT device for long term outdoor installations, so it needed to survive very hot temps. We had a refrigerator we gutted and added heat to, and we'd run a simulation with heavier than expected load for a couple days and tossed/RMAd the bad units.

That was a literal burn in, but the same concept ak applies to pretty much everything. If you build/buy a PC, test the hardware (prime95 CPU test, memtest for RAM, etc). Put it through its paces to work out the major bugs before relying on it so you don't have to RMA a production system.

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I had bad experiences with Seagate between 2002 and 2009. Multiple, sudden, premature drive failures under ideal operating conditions. I haven't bought a Seagate drive in over 10 years.

WD enterprise grade hardware is still good for me, as of 2 years ago. Their customer service sucks but the hardware is still good

In general I tend to go for Toshiba or Hitachi (rebranded to a different name if I recall...) if I have a preference. I have some really old drives like 15+ years old still chugging along.

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AFR is a percentage, 1 drive from a pool of 10 means 10%, 5 droves from 100 means 5%; so with regards to your point that they don’t have much WD drives, if they don’t have much WD, then each fail is even more detrimental on the chart, therefore making the data even more impactful.

When there’s a clear trend of higher failure rate represented as a percentage, I’m not going to volunteer my data, NAS or otherwise, as tribute to brand loyalty from a manufacture that’s gone downhill from the decades past.

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The failure rate is annualized, so age of drive is also factored into the consideration.

Sort of. If we're mostly seeing failures during the first year or two and high average age, that means their QC is terrible, but that's something a consumer can work with by burning in drives. If average age is lower, that means drives are probably failing further into their life, which means a burn-in won't likely detect the worst of it.

If Seagate were so unreliable, why would Backblaze be using so much of them? They used to use cheap consumer drives in the past, but if you look at the drives they have in service, they're pretty much all enterprise class drives, so it's not like they're abusing customer warranties or anything.

Here's a survey of IT pros from 2019, which gives Seagate the award for every single category for Enterprise HDDs:

While the top two companies of Enterprise HDDs were close in all categories, Seagate has proven itself a leader by being voted Market for the seventh year in a row; also picking up titles for Price, Performance, Reliability, Innovation, and Service and Support, sweeping the board for a two-year streak. Western Digital came in second for all categories trailed by Toshiba.

Backblaze places Toshiba as first for reliability, whereas this survey put them third.

Why the discrepancy? Idk, but there's a good chance Backblaze is doing something wonky in their reporting, or they have significantly different environmental factors in their datacenters or something than average. Or maybe they're not burning in their drives (or counting those as failures) and other IT pros are (and not counting those as failures). Maybe their goal is to reduce demand so they can get the drives cheaper. I really don't know.

I'm not going to tell you what you should buy. I personally have WD drives in my NAS because I got a decent price for them years ago, but I wouldn't hesitate to put Seagate drives in there either. Regardless, I'm going to test the drives when I get them.

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It is pretty clear that you have less of an inclination against Seagate than my experience dictates me to. Stats can be twisted to tell anything, and my twist on what I’m seeing tells me to steer away from Seagate; your interpretation can most certainly differ.

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Stats can be twisted

Exactly. My argument here is to be careful with published stats, because they're easy to misinterpret, and they're also easy to misrepresent.

Backblaze's data is good, just be careful when making conclusions based on it.

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https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2069436850145993

50 States, 50 Protests, 1day

Feb 5 @ your downtown.

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I thought they were erasing the SMART data and selling the drives as new

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Shit, I missed that part. I thought it was in SMART that the hours came up.

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German Seagate customers say their 'new' hard drives were actually used – resold HDDs reportedly used for tens of thousands of hours