[BBLISA] Whatever happened to Seagate?

[Dewey Sasser]

On 5/7/2015 3:39 PM, Carl 'Alex' Alexander wrote:
> I have to say, I'm a little surprised to see this thread here in 2015.
> Older and wiser heads were flaming me on this topic back in the 20th
> Century.  Since roughly when the first bubble burst, the hard-drive
> market has been too competitive and fluid to make useful comparisons
> between manufacturers:  by the time anyone this side of Google or the
> NSA has seen enough recent drives to discern a pattern among any one
> manufacturer's products, that pattern will have played itself out.
> Past performance, even if there exists a real trend to be found,
> turns out to be orthogonal to future results.

The Backblaze data (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/) 
suggests otherwise.

While not perfectly predictive, I believe there is sufficient data to 
find at least several-year trends between manufacturers and even 
manufacturers product lines.  Knowing something about the technology 
behind some drives (and SSDs) can be even more informative, which is why 
e.g. NewEgg has the SSD controller listed.

While I agree that "brand loyalty" over a decade is irrelevant, I think 
patterns in manufacturers and particularly product lines can be a useful 
(but, of course, not perfect) predictor.

I have, however, found that people often weight brand higher than drive 
class for predictions, which is particularly error-prone for SSDs (as 
"Enterprise" drives tend to have higher over-provisioning ratios, which 
help nearly everything).

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D