PATA hard disks, anyone?

[Liam Proven]

On 28 March 2018 at 01:43, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> Digging around on the pointer from Al to backblaze, I found this, which,
> to me is far more meaningful in terms of presentation of data:
>
> https://hackernoon.com/applying-medical-statistics-to-the-backblaze-hard-drive-stats-36227cfd5372

Remarkable and fascinating.

The charts for Seagate are especially reliable.

It came as a surprise to me. In 30y in the business, almost anyone
involved in selecting, specifying, purchasing, or maintaining hardware
inevitably has _strong_ opinions on the reliability, or lack thereof,
of certain brands of hard disk.

Personally, I've used them _all_. I've seen several-decades-old hard
disks working perfectly, I've seen brand new drives fail, I've watched
batches of them die progressively.

They can _all_ fail. I have no angels or demons -- I have seen random
sudden failures of every vendor known to humanity, and superb
longevity from every vendor too.

But if there's a general trend, it's that the bigger, the more
fragile. I have decade-old 300GB drives in routine use that are fine.
I've also had multiple failures of new multi-terabyte-class drives, to
my personal cost.

-- 
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