Hard Drive Reliability Study Flawed? 237
storagedude writes "A recent study of hard drive reliability by Backblaze was deeply flawed, according to Henry Newman, a longtime HPC storage consultant. Writing in Enterprise Storage Forum, Newman notes that the tested Seagate drives that had a high failure rate were either very old or had known issues. The study also failed to address manufacturer's specifications, drive burn-in and data reliability, among other issues. 'The oldest drive in the list is the Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drive from 2006. A drive that is almost 8 years old! Since it is well known in study after study that disk drives last about 5 years and no other drive is that old, I find it pretty disingenuous to leave out that information. Add to this that the Seagate 1.5 TB has a well-known problem that Seagate publicly admitted to, it is no surprise that these old drives are failing.'"
Re:Last about five years? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:In all fairness (Score:5, Funny)
Or a bad batch?
No, of course not. This is /. It must be that a major hard drive manufacturer that was around 20+ years prior, and is still around 14 years later made nothing but bricks and packaged them as hard drives. That's how they survived when so many of their competitors went bankrupt. Bricks are so much cheaper to produce, so the profit margin is considerably higher. ;-)
Re: 5 years? That's not a given. (Score:5, Funny)
I have an 80gb ide deskstar that runs as primary storage for my DNS, key, and SSH jump box for my home network.
Theolder a drive gets, you need to put it into higher positions of authority and privilege due to its years of experience. It inverts the failure rate (which is mainly from burnout and boredom of routine).