Are hard drives getting better?

Anecdotal reliability & “planned obsolescence”

• Several commenters report HDDs (especially WD) failing very close to the end of their warranty window, reinforcing a suspicion of planned obsolescence.
• Others have 8–10+ year-old drives or NASes still running with minimal failures, suggesting large variance and some “outlier” long-lived units.

Vendors, warranties, and data recovery

• WD is criticized for perceived engineered lifetimes and for the past SMR-in-NAS incident, which permanently damaged trust for some.
• Seagate is viewed as more failure-prone overall, but with some very reliable lines and strong warranty support plus good low-level tools; some think Backblaze data already shows Seagate’s weaker models clearly.
• Free in-warranty data recovery (e.g. some Seagate models) is considered highly valuable given the usual cost of recovery services.

Interpreting Backblaze statistics

• Multiple comments stress the limits of the dataset:
  • Many models have small sample sizes or short observation windows.
  • By the time a model looks good, it’s often discontinued or internally changed.
• Suggestions include:
  • Grouping by manufacture (“birth”) cohort and purchase year.
  • Excluding newer drives when analyzing multi‑year failure rates.
  • Using more formal methods (PCA, survival analysis, error bars, statistical tests) instead of slicing the data “three ways to hell and back.”
• Consensus: you can infer trends (e.g. HGST generally good, some Seagate lines bad), but not simple “brand X good/brand Y bad” rules.

Power, environment, and infrastructure

• For 8‑year lifetimes, some suspect home “dirty power” more than manufacturing; others argue modern PSUs largely normalize line noise.
• UPS use at home is debated: protection vs cost, maintenance hassles, beeping, and limited energy storage.
• Data centers like Backblaze still encounter power and cooling “adventures,” so environment is a significant, though opaque, factor.

Home storage and backup strategies

• Many see drive failure as primarily a cost/annoyance issue if backups are done properly; RAID alone is repeatedly distinguished from backup.
• Common personal strategies:
  • ZFS with RAIDZ or mirrors, frequent scrubs, and offsite/remote ZFS snapshot replication (sometimes to a friend’s house).
  • Rotating or tiered RAID1 arrays, periodically replacing drives in cohorts every ~3–5 years.
  • Hybrid: local NAS (Synology/TrueNAS/Debian) plus cloud backup (Backblaze, S3/Glacier, Hetzner, etc.).
• Some push back on “park a server at a friend’s house” as socially awkward; others treat it as normal mutual help among technically inclined friends.
• Emotional data-loss stories (e.g. wedding photos, dissertations) reinforce the importance of multiple backups and documented restore procedures.

Media choices & long‑term archiving

• HDDs are still seen as the most practical for multi‑TB personal archives; SSDs are distrusted for powered‑off retention.
• Tapes:
  • Viewed as excellent for cold backups and used-tape + older LTO-drive combos can be affordable.
  • Break-even vs HDD estimated (by a cited Reddit analysis) somewhere around 50–100 TB; below that HDDs likely cheaper.
  • Market is heavily “enterprise‑y” with few consumer‑friendly products.
• M‑Disc:
  • Once attractive for longevity, but some claim true M‑Disc media is no longer really available and current products may just be high‑grade BD‑R.
• Paper/physical:
  • One camp advocates printing important photos; another notes generational loss and aging prints, and experiments with QR/base64 “paper backups” are capacity‑limited and fiddly.

Bitrot, integrity, and tooling

• ZFS is praised for automatic checksumming, scrubbing, and snapshotting, catching silent corruption that disks or filesystems might not report.
• Alternatives include manual hashing plus checksum files, PAR files, and carefully managed cold drives.
• There’s concern about USB enclosures that don’t expose SMART, making proactive monitoring harder.

Cost, capacity, and “failure per byte”

• Some argue that higher capacity at similar MTBF effectively improves reliability per TB, since fewer drives are needed, though rebuild times and blast radius per drive grow.
• Others note that larger disks double rebuild time and risk exposure, partially offsetting the “fewer spindles” advantage.
• Enterprise drives may cost ~20% more per TB but could yield significantly longer lifetimes; commenters want clearer data to justify that tradeoff.

Materials, sustainability, and rare earths

• A side thread discusses whether there are enough rare earths for expanding storage demand:
  • One view: elements aren’t “used up,” just relocated; future generations might mine landfills.
  • Counterpoints: landfill extraction may be economically/technically difficult, and other metals (cobalt, nickel, copper, PGMs) may be more critical constraints than rare earths.

Other technical notes

• Bathtub curve: commenters think it’s still a useful high‑level model but acknowledge it breaks down with firmware bugs and correlated failures.
• Drive engineering:
  • Mention of 11‑platter helium HDDs; double‑height drives are considered impractical because of rack/form‑factor constraints.
• SSD/NVMe reliability:
  • Several people report unsettling issues with recent Samsung NVMe drives (e.g. transient “disappearances,” suspected firmware bugs, or silent corruption on non‑checksumming filesystems), prompting brand re‑evaluation and more diverse mirrors.