We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
So how many more stories of these drives being absolute garbage do we all have?
Of all the drives I've ever owned. From Hitachi, Maxxtor, Seagate, Western Digital and others...this is the only one I've had that died. Apparently this is a trend with these particular drives?
This one is currently a paperweight
I use the Backblaze HD data when I teach workshops in survival analysis to data scientists (I'm a statistician) and indeed according to the data this is by far the worst HD among all the consumer HD they use. This is true even after adjusting for numbers of cycles and power-on hours.
The hazard ratio, a conventional measure of risk if you will, for this drive is approximately 25 times worse than that of the reference drive (another Seagate). That means they die at a rate that is 25 times worse (everything else being equal).
The other interesting part that emerged from the data is that Seagate both produced the worst and also one of the best drives in terms of survival (yet the damage was done by that model).