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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how the numbers carry over year-to-year in

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Bl...

Some models are dwindling. Some are being tested. Others (like the Seagate and HGST 12 TB) are increasing. Only thing that's really perplexing is why they keep buying more and more of the high-failure-rate Seagate 12 TB drives. It must be more than 3% cheaper to buy (and service!) a Seagate with a 3% chance of failure than to buy an equivalent HGST with a 0.4% chance of failure. I guess when you have 120,000 drives, easy hot-swap enclosures, and software to handle it all that makes good sense! But as an individual consumer, even with a Backblaze backup, it's definitely worth my time to spend a bit more on a drive that's far more reliable than to save a few dollars on a Seagate.

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If I make a hard drive, and sales are crappy, in part because BackBlaze told the world how shitty they are, I'm going to have to drop the prices to move product.

I suppose there's a movie plot in there where BackBlaze negs their favorite drive so they can buy them cheaper.

> Only thing that's really perplexing is why they keep buying more and more of the high-failure-rate Seagate 12 TB drives.

I am guessing they RMA the drives and get replacements.

Your comment just sparked an interesting question in my mind: If a drive has failed, until now I always imagined the drive was just trashed. But now that you mention they are probably RMA'ing them, do you think that BackBlaze send the RMA drives through a magnetic tunnel of some sort before they ship the drives back to the manufacturer? Because otherwise, how do they ensure potentially unencrypted customer files are not accessed during the repair/refurbishment process?

When I back things up with BackBlaze, they leave my computer encrypted, so they're encrypted at rest with them.

I work at a large B2B SaaS that stores customer data, we pay extra for the option not to return failed drives that can't be wiped for RMA. We still get a replacement but the original is physically destroyed with a shredder.

I'd hope that their data is all encrypted at rest. Compared to the bandwidth of spinning disks, the cost of doing hardware assisted AES isn't big.

Yeah, I would expect any data reaching the drives to be encrypted by Backblaze, with the key newer reaching the disk.

You could even have keys per disk and wipe them when a disk fails.

Either way, you should be fine to RMA the drives as for an external observer without the keys they just contain random noise.

They once wrote somewhere that they have contracts with Seagate that allow them to get the drives much cheaper if they buy certain quantities.

At least in Europe, HGST is much more expensive than Seagate. Almost double the price, usually.

Very anecdotal evidence, but 3 of the 3 Seagate drives I ever used (all external 2,5” USB 3 HDD’s, in Seagate’s own enclosures) failed within 2 years, under very modest workloads (just used to store video files for my tv to play).

Meanwhile all WD’s have been rock solid.

FWIW, the consensus on /r/datahoarder seems to be that Seagates should be the absolute last choice for long-term storage.

Seagate do an 'archive' HDD, but with only a 3-year warranty I wouldn't expect it to work as a long term solution.

I wonder if that's a characteristic of streaming a single file, consecutive blocks. That's be really strange behaviour though. Perhaps a thermal issue if the TV keeps it powered and spinning all the time? Certainly Xbox seems to keep the disk spinning - I had a WD Ext HDD attached and the light was always flickering even with the console off for whatever reason.

Personally I also find Seagate the loudest and 'clickiest' of all the drive brands. I can hear the mechanicals, making me think they will fail, so I trust them less than other brands.

I have same experience with 5x 3 GB Seagates. None lasted 2 years. Replaced those with Toshiba's and HGST in my Synology and it's been 3+ years without bad sectors. Will never buy Seagate again.

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