Component reliability figures

[Grauniad]

One of the most important decisions to make when purchasing is "how relaible are the components I buy?"

In general, the answer is "very". For most components and devices - automobiles, motherboards, televisions, whatever, modern manufacturing is usually fairly reliable. Once in a blue moon a quality problem slips though (Pentium 4, anyone? or the fiasco with Nvidiamobile graphics cards a few years back).

But small numbers make things very difficult. Is a failure rate of 2.5% acceptable? Maybe, but if you know that a competitive manufacturer has a failure rate of .5%, then the decision changes. In both cases the majority of purchasers will never have a problem. But if the manufacturer sells 1,000,000 units of each, then one product will have 25,000 failures and the other will have "only" 5,000 unhappy customers - that's a big deal.

It is really not easy to accurately determine the failure rate of PC components. The best job is done by the French site, hardware.fr. They monitor some large French electronics retailers for product returns. The problem? Well, the site is in French, for starters.

Google Translate is a great help and here is a screen grab of one section - the return rate of SSDs



Now tell me: Would you buy an OCZ or Crucual SSD? How much cheaper would they have to be than a Samsung SSD before you'll take the gamble that yours won't fail?

[Grauniad]

Cloud storage firm Backblaze reported results of a study that found that consumer hard drives are as reliable as enterprise hard drives - for the first 3 years.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/385792/consumer-hard-drives-as-reliable-as-enterprise-hardware

Here's the original source artice in the Backblaze blog: http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/11/12/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/

[Grauniad]

ExtremeTech has another article featuring BackBlaze's research.

BackBlaze is an online backup company and has around 28,000 hard drives spinning 24/7.

The ExtremeTech article is in the image links. The full BackBlaze article breaks it down by specific models.




I know Helper might not agree, based on his experience. It also makes me a little apprehensive, because based on the much higher review rating on Newegg, I just ordered my first 4TB Seagate NAS drive. I should have gone with Hitachi... :)

Note: Regardless of what you buy, you still have a (very small) chance that your drive will fail earlier than the statistical average.

[miquelfire]

I remember a Seagate I bought (first SATA drive actually), and at the time I ordered it, lots of reviews on Newegg were good, putting the avg about 4 to 4.5 (maybe higher), then for whatever reason, when I looked a year later, the reviews were mostly "Drive dies after a year". Enough to knock the rating below 3. I quickly stopped using that drive for my OS soon after that (and getting too annoyed at my RAID breaking so often because the drives I have now seem RAID hostile). OS drive double in space as a result however :P