The largest study of hard disks is by a company called BackBlaze. The most reliable drives are Hitachi. The worst by far is Seagate, although Seagate's 4T offering is looking pretty solid.

 

Check out this post which contains a graph and a link to the full story.

 

Seagate 2T are aweful!

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31446.msg284549#msg284549

 

guess you missed the larger study (4x) http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf

 

The backblaze "study" is not well supported.

 

The troublesome seagates were 1.5TB (blackblaze did not report on the also bad 1TB), and very narrowly confined to specific manufacturing periods. The manner in which backblaze purchases and uses drives excludes them from manufacture support. This cost them badly on the 1.5TB, they all died, no warranty. They still have 2TB drives.

 

You can find details on the seagate issue here

guess you missed the larger study (4x) http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf

 

The backblaze "study" is not well supported.

 

The troublesome seagates were 1.5TB (blackblaze did not report on the also bad 1TB), and very narrowly confined to specific manufacturing periods. The manner in which backblaze purchases and uses drives excludes them from manufacture support. This cost them badly on the 1.5TB, they all died, no warranty. They still have 2TB drives.

 

You can find details on the seagate issue here

 

I did miss that study. Looks like some interesting light reading which I will do later. I personally had 100% failure of the 2 2T Seagates I bought and put in my array, one of which showed no symptoms and turned out to the the most complex issue I have ever tried to diagnose with my server. Interestingly I have 2 1.5T drives in desktops, not ever in my array that are running fine to this day. I did upgrade their firmware if I remember right. My array is almost exclusively Hitachi and have not had a single one fail. My last drive failure was a 2T WD - it was one of only 2 WDs I bought. The other one is ok for now.

 

I have bought several Seagate 4T and 5T recently, and hopeful that they will be long lived. Seems "Coolspin" internal Hitachi (HGST) drives are being pulled from the market, which is a shame because they are the most reliable I have found.

 

Can you explain what do you mean by "not well supported"? (Thanks!)

 

Have 2 st3000dm001 drives, one as the parity drive for at least 2 years now. Works well, never had any issues with them. Though I am partial the hitachi drives, cost a bit cheaper at the time and had a longer warranty period.