I read the whole article, I just don't agree with their methods. I believe it makes their numbers in-accurate. Something can't fail more than once, if the replacement fails then that is still only a 100% failure rate. The replacement drive counts as a new drive in the study.
............ but will run flawlessly in a desktop.
It seems that you just want to insist that they (Backblaze) produced the results of this study to influence people into buying or not buying a series of drives. This is a long running blog of a company dedicated to "our cloud storage", as referred in the opening paragraph. They had a drive shortage, as many did, they had to source many drives from many different companies to keep up with their demand, and they decided to keep track of the drives replaced, and, in their experience, the drives' real-world MTBF, in a Cloud Environment:
"In the Backblaze environment..."
"Some drives just don’t work in the Backblaze environment"
This is an Online Cloud Storage/Backup company. They have no apparent desire to influence people to purchase one series of drives over another, and in fact, several times stated the have a preference for the WD reds, which they don't portray as having many of at all:
"Our other favorite is the Western Digital 3TB Red (WD30EFRX)."
"We wish we had more of the Western Digital Red 3TB drives (WD30EFRX)"
They
do speak highly of the Hitachi drives they have ("If the price were right, we would be buying nothing but Hitachi drives"), but again, people reading this blog are made aware UP FRONT (if for some reason they assumed instead of reading) that this is in a Cloud Storage environment, not a bank of desktop computers.
Simply put, this blog shows a wide variety of drives in a large databank cloud storage environment, larger than most of us could dream of at this point, but just on a larger scale than what many of us have in our house or place of business. As such, it is highly interesting to me that the WD Red, designed for the RAID environ, scored worse than the equivalent Hitachi Desktar.
Western Digital Red
(WD30EFRX)3.0TB __________346_______________0.5_______________3.2%
Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000
(HDS723030ALA640)3.0TB ___1027_____________2.1________________0.9%
As for " the replacement fails then that is still only a 100% failure rate.", that's just playing with numbers. As a computer tech in this forum, I had absolutely no problem understanding that that meant they had drives fail and be replaced in less than a year's time. If someone didn't understand that, they were reading the wrong blog, and meant to be reading about Paddington Bear, not Backblaze. (Plainly, how would
you explain that they bought **for instance** 100 drives, and had 120 fail in one year, on average? I understood it...)
What's the issue here? It almost sounds like a fanboi rant from you, which I'm sure you aren't. The company provided some serious real-world data, description of the environment used, reasoning behind the layout and build structure, and their experience with several different drive types. They appear to have no hidden agenda, no company affiliation beyond their own, I don't see any harm done that anyone who cares to read these type articles could possibly experience. If Joe Public decides to read it, and then decides to buy a Hitachi over a Western Digital or Seagate, who is harmed? If it's a question of "Seagate's not that bad!!!",
Tom's Hardware readers appear to disagree, and if any of us are going to take someone's word over another, what does it matter that there's another dissenting opinion?
To the educated reader, all the information explaining the parameters of the "test" are in plain text. To the uneducated, they're still wondering if their microwave is spying on them for the NSA.....