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Hard Drive Failure Rates

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The 1.5Tb had bad firmware causing them to fail, after about a dozen RMA's I finally got some that worked.
Back Blaze said that firmware caused a lot of those Seagates to fail, but they also said they didn't count drives that failed during their ~3 weeks of initial testing. So does that mean those Seagates had an even higher failure rate, or does it mean Back Blaze's initial testing isn't very good?
 
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Across the 10 computers I own, with 14 Seagate drives in total, I haven't had one fail in the 12 years my business has be open. I must be lucky. Granted I have replaced slower 5400 rpm drives with 7200 rpm drives throughout the years. Heck, they're even in a grungy industrial environment and are probably maintained less than they should be.

*Also, the "annual failure rate" is for one company... or blog site or whatever, Blackblaze. Can't say I know or trust the source.
 
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newtekie1

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Back Blaze said that firmware caused a lot of those Seagates to fail, but they also said they didn't count drives that failed during their ~3 weeks of initial testing. So does that mean those Seagates had an even higher failure rate, or does it mean Back Blaze's initial testing isn't very good?
Another issues with BackBlaze's study is the testing method, or rather what they consider a "failed drive". To them, a drive has failed when it starts generating RAID errors. But a RAID error can be caused just by the drive taking too long to respond to a command, which wouldn't matter in a desktop environment. That doesn't mean a has actually failed, but to them and their study it does.
 
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