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Not really, the longer a drive is in operation, the more likely it will fail and all drives, even the best of the lot show a certain defect rate at all points of their life cycle. A shorter warranty is a cost saving thing, not a product confidence thing.
That is dismissive of a good point, and I think you misunderstand what "confidence" means for a company.
But to say it's indicative of a higher failure rate is not actually true. More often than not, if a drive lives through the first year, it's going to follow a normal failure curve anyways(ie most drives have a pretty common failure rate per year of their life). You're just inferring that if a drive has a shorter warranty, it's going to be more prone to failure. The funny thing about the analysis you linked me to is that most(if not all) of those drives are from 2 manufacturers anyways. But more importantly, if a drive costs 20% more for a 2 year longer warranty, that is significantly above the failure percentage of even the worst hard drives. One would be better off with more cheaper drives than less more expensive drives(for the same cost) despite the longer warranties. That was actually the premise that started BlackBlaze's practices and they still claim they have saved money by purchasing drives as cheaply as possible vs getting the best possible drives. Not that I think their testing is very useful(because failure rate in specified situations is hard to extrapolate to real world data), but the cost analysis is fairly empirical.mrmalten wrote: ↑ That is completely unhelpful and dismissive of a good point.
If you're not looking at warranty, you're making a mistake. Either way you look at it, the consumer is getting less with a shorter warranty. If the manufacturer thinks the drive is really good, it's going to have a long warranty reflecting that reliability (or offsetting a disaster).
Cost savings / confidence is the same thing. A 3 year warranty says the failure rate will exceed acceptable loss levels for periods over 3 years (ie the drive is more likely to fail). In the past the standard was 5 years and they still have 5 years on enterprise drives. It comes down to saying the expected life of the product is statistically shorter, or they simply don't want to stand behind the product for as long. 3 years is better than many external drives, which often only get 1 year.
Here's PCMag's 2017 ratings. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2400958,00.asp
quote for you: "Warranty length is also a big factor in our ratings: Drives can and will fail. That cheap drive you found on a deal site may only come with a one-year warranty. Look for a three- or five-year warranty if you're hard on your drives."
There is no empirical evidence that these are bad drives. How many drives do you plan to run and in what kind of RAID setup? I'm more of the mind that buying cheaper drives and self insuring is more effective than relying on warranties and lengthy RMA processes only to be sent a refurbished drive anyways. The odds of a failure in most drives is still in the single digits and the odds of multiple drive failures in short proximity is really quite low, that said, I prefer to diversify my drives by type to avoid the possibility of batch failure.
One of the drives inside my DS413 is this seagate and has been in there for a while without problems.
Works fine in RAID; good price too.
This is a PMR drive (regular hard drive). This is NOT a SMR drive.arandomguy wrote: ↑ Just a heads up this is a SMR drive.
I'm skeptical because it is a 3 platter drive, that is over 1 TB/platter in terms of density. The exact same density as their Archive drives.
arandomguy wrote: ↑ I'm skeptical because it is a 3 platter drive, that is over 1 TB/platter in terms of density. The exact same density as their Archive drives.
IMO, the concerns over SMR drives are a little blown out of proportion. Their only real impact on performance is sustained write speeds which most people don't have to worry about on a regular basis. Considering the typical user is probably using these as media storage anyways. I don't think it's particularly a big deal. For those that have more specific needs, such as a lot of frequent archival, I can see it being an issue but I doubt most will ever even notice, outside of transferring a massive amount of files from one drive to another(which most people don't do more than a couple times over the life of a drive).arandomguy wrote: ↑ I'm skeptical because it is a 3 platter drive, that is over 1 TB/platter in terms of density. The exact same density as their Archive drives.
Seagate Barracuda ST4000DM005 -
http://www.seagate.com/www-content/prod ... 04656b.pdf
Seagate Archive Drive specs/manual - http://www.seagate.com/www-content/prod ... 43737d.pdf
It also used the same term of "TGMR recording technology" for both. Whereas their other manuals will specify perpendicular.
