Search the Community

Seagate today announced a new line of hard drives with up to 10TB of capacity for desktops computers, network-attached storage (NAS) and surveillance systems. The high-capacity drives, dubbed the Guardian Series, represent a 2TB increase over the capacity of previous Seagate hard drives in the consumer and small business category. The Guardian series consists of the BarraCuda Pro desktop drive, the Seagate IronWolf for NAS applications and the Seagate SkyHawk for video surveillance systems. Seagate also said it has resurrected the Barracuda brand for its line of consumer desktop and laptop hard drives, a name it did away with in favor of the "Desktop Hard Drive" brand a few years ago. Seagate changed the spelling to "BarraCuda." The standard BarraCuda line now includes hard disk drives with spindle speeds ranging from 5,900rpm to 7,200rpm and capacities ranging from 500GB to 10TB. The drives also come with 16GB to 64GB of DRAM cache, depending on the overall capacity, and are being offered in 2.5-in. laptop form factors and 3.5-in. desktop sizes. The thinnest 2.5-in. BarraCuda drive is 7mm thick, small enough for ultrathin notebooks; it offers up to 2TB of capacity. The updated BarraCuda drive line will offer sustained data transfer rates of up to 210MB/s. The 2TB models will retail for $81 and the 3TB models will sell for $100. Seagate also announced a new drive for PC "enthusiasts," the BarraCuda Pro, which comes in capacities of up to 10TB. The drive has a 7,200rpm spindle speed and a data transfer rate of up to 220MB/s, and comes with a five-year limited warranty. That's more than twice the typical two-year BarraCuda HDD warranty. "BarraCuda Pro offers the highest PC Compute spin speed at 7200 RPM for 3.5-in. HDD drives on the market," said Chris Deardorff, a Seagate senior marketing strategist. The drive also comes with Seagate's Self-Encryption Drive (SED) technology, which password protects data on the drive but also allows users to crypto-erase it by changing the encryption key, ensuring no one can access it. The BarraCuda Pro can sustain up to 55TB of data writes per year, according to Deardorff. The 10TB BarraCuda Pro will retail for $535. Another hard drive announced today in the BarraCuda lineup is the FireCuda, which is aimed at gamers and comes in both 2.5-in. and 3.5-in. Form factors, and either 1TB or 2TB of capacities. The FireCuda is a solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD), which means it uses a small amount (8GB) of NAND flash as a caching element to increase performance up to five times over standard BarraCuda drives. Data is first written to the NAND flash prior to the hard drive, which enables higher performance considering the spindle speed is just 5,900rpm. The drive has a maximum sustained read rate of 210MB/s. Seagate has been selling SSHDs since 2011, so the FireCuda is not new technology. The FireCuda will retail for $85 for a 1TB drive, $110 for the 2TB model. For small businesses, Seagate has refreshed its NAS drive lineup with the IronWolf brand. The IronWolf is aimed at NAS devices with one to 16 drive bays and comes with up to 10TB capacity and Seagate's AgileArray (formely NASworks) software on it. AgileArray technology supports error recovery controls, power management and vibration tolerance for reliability when used in multi-bay NAS devices. The IronWolf, which is rated for up to 180TB of writes per year, sports a higher resiliency than other Seagate drive models with a one million meantime before failure (MTBF) rating, according to Jennifer Bradfield, a Seagate senior director of product marketing. The drive can also power down into a sleep mode while not being used, sipping only .8 watts of power compared with the 6.8 watts of power it uses while active. The IronWolf HDDs offer a Rescue Data Recovery Service plan that protects against data loss from viruses, software issues, or mechanical and electrical breakdowns in a NAS or RAID environment. A failed drive can be sent back to Seagate where its in-house "Rescue Service" will attempt to retrieve data. The drive also comes with a three-year limited warranty. The IronWolf 10TB HDD will retail for $470. Seagate's new SkyHawk HDD lineup is a rebrand of the previous Sv35 series video surveillance hard drive. The new 7,200rpm drive comes with up to 10TB of capacity for storing up to 10,000 hours of HD video. It also comes with ImagePerfect firmware from MTC Technology. The firmware, which allows the drive to be used by motion-sensing cameras, powers down the drive when it's not in use to reduce power consumption and heat generation. It then powers up quickly to provide uninterrupted recording. Like the IronWolf, the SkyHawk drives use rotational vibration sensors to help minimize read/write errors, and it can support up to 64 HD cameras -- more than any other drive on the market, according to Aubrey Muhlach, Seagate's Worldwide Surveillance Segment marketing manager. Designed for modern, high-resolution systems running around the clock, SkyHawk drives also come with a data recovery services option. The SkyHawk HDD supports up to 180TB worth of data writes per year, has a one million hour MTBF and a three-year limited warranty. The 10TB SkyHawk HDD will retail for $460. Source: ComputerWorld View the full article

It's not hard to get a capacious solid-state drive if you're running a server farm, but everyday users still have to be picky more often than not: either you get a roomy-but-slow spinning hard drive or give up that capacity in the name of a speedy SSD. Samsung may have finally delivered a no-compromise option, however. It's introducing a 4TB version of the 850 Evo that, in many cases, could easily replace a reasonably large hard drive. While it's not the absolute fastest option (the SATA drive is capped at 540MB/s sequential reads and 520MB/s writes), it beats having to resort to a secondary hard drive just to make space for your Steam game library. Of course, there's a catch: the price. The 4TB 850 Evo will set you back a whopping $1,500 in the US, so it's largely reserved for pros and well-heeled enthusiasts who refuse to settle for rotating storage. Suddenly, the $700 2TB model seems like a bargain. Even if the 4TB version is priced into the stratosphere, though, it's a good sign that SSDs are turning a corner in terms of viability. It might not be long before high-capacity SSDs are inexpensive enough that you won't have to make any major sacrifices to put one in your PC. Source: EnGadget View the full article

At Backblaze we now have 34,881 drives and store over 100 petabytes of data. We continually track how our disk drives are doing, which ones are reliable, and which ones need to be replaced. I did a blog post back in January, called “What Hard Drive Should I Buy?†It covered the reliability of each of the drive models that we use. This month I’m updating those numbers and sharing some surprising new findings. Reliability of Hard Drive Brands Losing a disk drive at Backblaze is not a big deal. Every file we back up is replicated across multiple drives in the data center. When a drive fails, it is promptly replaced, and its data is restored. Even so, we still try to avoid failing drives, because replacing them costs money. We carefully track which drives are doing well and which are not, to help us when selecting new drives to buy. The good news is that the chart today looks a lot like the one from January, and that most of the drives are continuing to perform well. It’s nice when things are stable. The surprising (and bad) news is that Seagate 3.0TB drives are failing a lot more, with their failure rate jumping from 9% to 15%. The Western Digital 3TB drives have also failed more, with their rate going up from 4% to 7%. In the chart below, the grey bars are the failure rates up through the end of 2013, and the colored bars are the failure rates including all of the data up through the end of June, 2014. You can see that all the HGST (formerly Hitachi) drives, the Seagate 1.5 TB and 4.0 TB, and Western Digital 1.0 TB drives are all continuing to perform as well as they were before. But the Seagate and Western Digital 3.0 TB drives failure rates are up quite a bit. What is the likely cause of this? It may be that those drives are less well-suited to the data center environment. Or it could be that getting them by drive farming and removing them from external USB enclosures caused problems. We’ll continue to monitor and report on how these drives perform in the future. Should we switch to enterprise drives? Assuming we continue to see a failure rate of 15% on these drives, would it make sense to switch to “enterprise†drives instead? There are two answers to this question: Today on Amazon, a Seagate 3 TB “enterprise†drive costs $235 versus a Seagate 3 TB “desktop†drive costs $102. Most of the drives we get have a 3-year warranty, making failures a non-issue from a cost perspective for that period. However, even if there were no warranty, a 15% annual failure rate on the consumer “desktop†drive and a 0% failure rate on the “enterprise†drive, the breakeven would be 10 years, which is longer than we expect to even run the drives for. The assumption that “enterprise†drives would work better than “consumer†drives has not been true in our tests. I analyzed both of these types of drives in our system and found that their failure rates in our environment were very similar — with the “consumer†drives actually being slightly more reliable. Detailed Reliability of Hard Drive Models This table shows the detailed breakdown of how many of which drives we have, how old they are on average, and what the failure rate is. It includes all drive models that we have at least 200 of. A couple of models are new to Backblaze and show a failure rate of “n/a†because there isn’t enough data yet for reliable numbers. Number of Hard Drives by Model at Backblaze Model Size Number of Drives Average Age in years Annual Failure Rate Seagate Desktop HDD.15 (ST4000DM000) 4.0TB 9619 0.6 3.0% HGST Deskstar 7K2000 (HGST HDS722020ALA330) 2.0TB 4706 3.4 1.1% HGST Deskstar 5K3000 (HGST HDS5C3030ALA630) 3.0TB 4593 2.1 0.7% Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 (ST3000DM001) 3.0TB 3846 1.9 15.7% HGST Megascale 4000.B (HGST HMS5C4040BLE640) 4.0TB 2884 0.2 n/a HGST Deskstar 5K4000 (HGST HDS5C4040ALE630) 4.0TB 2627 1.2 1.2% Seagate Barracuda LP (ST31500541AS) 1.5TB 1699 4.3 9.6% HGST Megascale 4000 (HGST HMS5C4040ALE640) 4.0TB 1305 0.1 n/a HGST Deskstar 7K3000 (HGST HDS723030ALA640) 3.0TB 1022 2.6 1.4% Western Digital Red (WDC WD30EFRX) 3.0TB 776 0.5 8.8% Western Digital Caviar Green (WDC WD10EADS) 1.0TB 476 4.6 3.8% Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (ST31500341AS) 1.5TB 365 4.3 24.9% Seagate Barracuda XT (ST33000651AS) 3.0TB 318 2.2 6.7% We use two different models of Seagate 3TB drives. The Barracuda 7200.14 is having problems, but the Barracuda XT is doing well with less than half the failure rate. There is a similar pattern with the Seagate 1.5TB drives. The Barracuda 7200.11 is having problems, but the Barracuda LP is doing well. Summary While the failure rate of Seagate and Western Digital 3 TB hard drives has started to rise, most of the consumer-grade drives in the Backblaze data center are continuing to perform well, and are a cost-effective way to provide unlimited online backup at a good price. Notes 9-30-2014 – We were nicely asked by the folks at HGST to replace the name Hitachi with the name HGST given that HGST is no longer an Hitachi company. To that end we have changed Hitachi to HGST in this post and in the graph. View the full article

In November, online backup provider Backblaze published some interesting statistics on hard drive mortality based on over 25,000 units in active service. It found that failure rates were higher in the first 18 months and after three years. Those conclusions matched the findings of other studies on the subject, but frustratingly, they didn't include information on specific makes and models. Today, Backblaze is naming names. The firm has posted details on failure rates for 15 different consumer-grade hard drives, and the numbers don't look good for Seagate. See for yourself: And that doesn't even tell the whole story. In Backblaze's storage pods, Seagate's Barracuda 1.5TB has an annual failure rate of over 25%. The 5,400-RPM version of that drive fares better—its failure rate is only 10%—but that's still pretty high compared to the competition. The failure rate of similar Hitachi drives in the same environment is less than 2%. Only 10% of the hard drives in Backblaze's storage pods come from WD, and they're strictly low-power Green and Red models. The annual failure rates are pretty low, though: only 3-4%. Backblaze's purchasing decisions are largely driven by price, which is probably why fewer WD drives are in the mix. They tend to be a little pricier. Interestingly, two drives proved to be so unreliable in Backblaze's storage pods that they were left out of the totals completely. Seagate's Barracuda LP 2TB and WD's Green 3TB "start accumulating errors as soon as they are put into production," the company says. It thinks vibration might be part of the problem. Other Barracuda LP and Green models seem unfazed, though. Here's a look at survival rates over time: After three years, only about three quarters of the Seagate drives remain. A surprising number of those failures come between 18 and 24 months, which contradicts the overall trend noted in Backblaze's initial study. Infant mortality seems to be a bigger problem for the WD drives, while the Hitachis fail at a steady but slow rate. Backblaze says the Seagate drives are also more prone to dropping out of RAID arrays prematurely. The company uses consumer-grade drives that aren't designed explicitly for RAID environments, of course, but that doesn't seem to bother the Hitachis. They spend just 0.01% of their time in so-called "trouble" states, compared to 0.17% for the WD drives and 0.28% for the Seagates. Overall, Backblaze's data suggests that Seagate drives are less reliable than their peers. That matches my own experiences with a much smaller sample size, and it may influence our future recommendations in the System Guide. Hmm. In the meantime, kudos to Backblaze for not only collecting this data, but also publishing a detailed breakdown. View the full article

My laptop needs a new hard drive. How do I know what type i need? The laptop is an HP model number is G60-519WM. Thanks Eddie

My grandson's PC needs a new internal hard drive. The PC is a Dell Dimension 8300 and currently has a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7, model #8T3120026A8. Can someone that knows about hard drives please provide a link or two of some compatible hard drives. I am looking for something similar to the original specs at an affordable price. thanks Eddie