Do You Know the Health of Your Hard Drives? Awhile back I shared some very interesting information regarding a backup service we use called Backblaze. Backblaze is an automated way to back up my many terabytes of external hard drives. The service is worth noting again by itself, but they also have some great info on their blog about hard drives, how long they last, which ones are the most dependable, etc.
My photo storage device of choice is the Drobo 5D which has a Thunderbolt 1 connection.
I wanted to visit this subject again since they recently released an updated report on Seagate hard drives that were bought during what they refer to as the Thailand drive crisis. For those who have forgotten or did not know, in 2011, Thailand had massive flooding that destroyed lots and lots of electronic products including a supplier of drives for Seagate. This not only put a blanket on supply, but it apparently affected the quality of the drives that Seagate was able to offer. In short, the drives Seagate was selling during this period and about one year thereafter had a warranty of only one year as opposed to their typical three year plan.
All of this has come home to hit Backblaze hard with the serious problem of Seagate drives failing in big numbers. I thought this information would be of interest to our readers so you can be aware of the very likely possibility that any Seagate drives you bought around the 2011 Thailand drive crisis most likely will be a problem. I know I’m checking my hard drives now to see when they were purchased.
Keep in mind this is not a critical report of Backblaze, they have not lost a single shred of anyone’s precious backups due to their amazing ability to stay on top of the problem. However, it’s not such a shining report on Seagate. Backblaze makes an effort not to blame Seagate in their blog post, but I have to say I’ve been disappointed in Seagate drives for several years now. This is just another black mark on their quality. For more information on the most stable drives you can buy, read the original blog post titled: Hard Drives and Digital Photography Workflow. This is the device of choice for our new workflow that includes Mylio and our Panasonic Lumix cameras.