Backblaze®, an online backup company, recently posted a comprehensive overview of various consumer hard drive models according to the company’s internal usage. The blog instantly made waves, as hard drive manufacturers typically post limited information about drive longevity.

“We don’t doubt the accuracy of Backblaze’s® information, but we don’t believe that their figures are representative of the industry as a whole,” said Ben Carmitchel, President of DataRecovery.com. “We still applaud Backblaze® for their invaluable service and for sharing that information to help their users, but their blog was never intended as a scientific analysis.”

According to DataRecovery.com’s media experts, Backblaze’s® small sample size could affect their results, and is contradictory to Datarecovery.com’s internal analysis which samples a far greater range of hard drives –all of which failed due to many different circumstances. Backblaze® reported information for more than 25,000 individual hard drives, and the most popular model in their pods was Seagate’s® ST4000DM000 at 5,199 drives.

However, some of the reporting used significantly smaller sample sizes. Backblaze® displayed failure rates for less than 1,000 of another manufacturer’s hard drives, and for two hard drive models, Backblaze® used less than 100 drives. This contributed to a notable failure rating of 120 percent for another Seagate® model (Backblaze® included warranty replacement drives in their numbers, which allowed failure rates to exceed 100 percent).

“Hard drive manufacturers ship millions of drives every day from many different factories, and a sample size of less than 2,000 or so will result in extremely inaccurate averages,” said Carmitchel.

“Even for those larger samples, Backblaze® would need to show that the drives’ failure rates were representative, and that’s a big issue. For instance, if a large number of the drives came from the same factory or if they were made within a short span of time, that would skew the statistics. That’s not even touching on drives’ working environment.”

More importantly, DataRecovery.com’s experts believe that hard drive buyers might be asking the wrong question. All major hard drive manufacturers have strict standards for acceptable failure rates, and according to DataRecovery.com’s internal analyses, prominent brands are very competitive in terms of longevity.

There are far too many variables involved to predict when a particular drive will fail, and Carmitchel says that buyers should look at other features such as seek times, noise levels, and power usage.

“It’s important to remember that every hard drive will fail at some point, and rather than trying to predict the failure, computer users should back up their data regularly and take appropriate actions to minimize stress on their systems,” Carmitchel said. “In the long run, it’s a much better approach.”

Datarecovery.com is a world leader in data recovery and computer forensics. With four locations in California, Illinois, Arizona, and Toronto, the company provides a variety of services to thousands of clients each year. Visit www.datarecovery.com for more information.

Contact Information

Datarecovery.com, Inc.
Ben Carmitchel
1-800-237-4200
www.datarecovery.com
Ph. 800.237.4200 ext. 269

The post Data Recovery Company Warns Computer Users Not to Take Backblaze’s® Hard Drive Failure Statistics Into Consideration When Making Purchases appeared first on Datarecovery.com.

One significant factor in IBM’s decision to sell the personal computing unit was a reported increase in warranty expenses between January 2003 and June 2004. An unusually high rate of problematic components is most likely the culprit for this increase. Nathan Wright of ESS Data Recovery (www.essdatarecovery.com) suggests that hard drive failure may have contributed to these expenses.

“We see a fair amount of hard drives that come from IBM units, both desktops and laptops. I wouldn’t say we get more IBM or Hitachi drives than other brands, though. Fortunately for IBM’s customers, the drives that come out of their computers tend to have higher data recovery success rates.”

IBM’s use of the IBM Travelstar and Deskstar ended in June of 2003 with the sale of IBM’s hard drive division to Hitachi Global Storage. IBM has continued to use the Hitachi Ultrastar, Deskstar, and Travelstar in its servers, desktop computers, and laptops since the sale.

Hitachi and Lenovo established a partnership in June of 2004 to develop storage solutions and services, primarily for the Chinese IT market. Wright says to expect more of the same when Lenovo picks up manufacturing of the former IBM personal computers.

“I would expect Lenovo to continue using Hitachi hard drives. If modifying our data recovery techiniques becomes necessary, we will make the changes.”

Contact Datarecovery.com at 1.800.237.4200 for more information.

The post Sale of IBM’s PC Division to Lenovo Won’t Affect Data Recovery appeared first on Datarecovery.com.