alt Hacker NewsI bought two WD Red 6TB drives for a NAS, and both failed within two years. That’s unusually bad in my experience. Across two other NAS systems I’ve used for 15–20 years, I’ve only replaced drives three times.
One failed drive was replaced with the same model, which doesn’t inspire much confidence. The other couldn’t be replaced, so I received a refund of the original €198 purchase price from 1.5 years ago. The exact same 6TB drive now costs around €340, a pretty steep increase. For the second drive I went with Seagate, fingers crossed.
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6TB Red, you say? That was about the time of their SMR scandal where they labeled junk drives for NAS use.
There’re still a couple of years left on my personal boycott timer before I’ll risk trusting them again. Every manufacturer has a bad batch sometimes, but that was egregious lying to customers.
My worst one was a 8 TB Seagate IronWolf from Amazon. Bought at the same time as an 8 TB WD Red, as I wanted to spread the risk. The WD is still running about six years later, but the IronWolf died in less than 1.5 years. Thankfully Amazon gave me a full refund, so I threw in a shucked 12 TB WD Elements that's now been running for about five years.
the appeal of the backblaze stats is that they provide data, not anecdotes