Every tech needs a guru, mine is Chris D. He runs circles around me most of the time and his baby face just lights up when he smiles.  No, he is not 10 years old, rather he is fully grown and married! But we successfully caught an impending hard drive crash and was able to clone the disk and install a new one which is what brings this topic to the forefront. Imagine my surprise when his recommendation was from outside the box i was familiar with and that is my lead story today:  HGST.

One billion hours on, and HGST still rules the roost for hard disk reliability

Even five-year-old disks are still going strong.

Peter Bright writes for ARS/Technica on May 17, 2016 an article worth reading:  “Cloud backup provider Backblaze has published the latest data it has accumulated about the reliability of the hard drives it uses. In the first quarter of the year, the company passed more than a billion hours of aggregate drive usage since it started tracking reliability in April 2013.” Imagine my surprise at the stats for Seagate … but considering that is the drive that was on the verge of failing … inspired this post: a cautionary tale.  More …