WD 4TB (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Friday, February 12, 2016, 17:22 (3003 days ago) @ Xenos

That's a very interesting read. I had some issues with Seagate hard drives back in 2009 so I switched to WD hard drives in my home server in 2010. Then I had some of those hard drives go bad also. So I've been hesitant on any hard drive purchases lately but did buy a 2TB WD passport hard drive for my laptop. Wonder what is going on with Seagate?

I work in the storage industry, no matter what company you use, hard drives will fail. Backblaze (a backup company who goes through a LOT of hard drives) analyzes them every year, and something like 20% of drives will fail within the first year on average. It's similar to most other tech industries: the amount of money needed to ensure that even 90% of their drives are defect free isn't worth it for them to invest.

I always use Hitachi (HGST now) enterprise drives when we make raids for editing. Even when we had a 16 drive raid, being used everyday for the course of like 8 months with 6K Redcode, not a single drive went under. In fact, I've never seen a hitachi drive fail personally. The key isn't so much the brand I think, as it is getting enterprise level drives if you care about that. In most cases, it's just cheaper to back up and buy a new one if it fails.

On a lower budget film, we went with a raid5 (or raid6 I forget) with regular non enterprise seagate drives, and bought a few extra. I think 2 failed during the course of cutting, and the only inconvenience was rebuilding the raid overnight when we replaced the failed drive.