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25,000-Drive Study Gives Insight On How Long Hard Drives Actually Last
MrSeb writes with this excerpt, linking to several pretty graphs: "For more than 30 years, the realm of computing has been intrinsically linked to the humble hard drive. It has been a complex and sometimes torturous relationship, but there's no denying the huge role that hard drives have played in the growth and popularization of PCs, and more recently in the rapid expansion of online and cloud storage. Given our exceedingly heavy reliance on hard drives, it's very, very weird that one piece of vital information still eludes us: How long does a hard drive last? According to some new data, gathered from 25,000 hard drives that have been spinning for four years, it turns out that hard drives actually have a surprisingly low failure rate."
Yah, except for my Western Digital Green which failed 3 days after the warranty expired. And similar accounts on newegg...
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
>> hard drives actually have a surprisingly low failure rate.
You call a 20% failure rate in 3 years LOW? My career rate is closer to 5% over 5 years - who keeps buying all those crappy hard drives?
I would love to see the breakdown(ha ha) by brands. But I would also like to see if they had temperature variations or power cycling stats.
Does a HD that is always on last for more or fewer hours? Ideal temperature? And a hard one to test, vibrations.
Cars? I thought they were talking about sex.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/02/18/0420247/google-releases-paper-on-disk-reliability
"Surprisingly, despite hard drives underpinning almost every aspect of modern computing (until smartphones), no one has ever carried out a study on the longevity of hard drives — or at least, no one has ever published results from such a study."
I recall reading a /. story from Google on THEIR experiences with hard drive longevity several years ago, over a much larger sampling of drives. Even linked to a PDF with the particulars....
Maybe they are to small to count, compared to an upstart backup company...
Four years isn't long enough. Come back to us when you reach 6 or 8 years. The study looked at drives during the warranty period (WD drives have 5 year warranty).
Also the information they presented doesn't show that low of a failure rate.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
99% of consumers have no backups and no raid, so 20% failure rate = 20% chance of losing EVERYTHING.
I call that an unacceptably high failure rate.
And note: I also have seen a 20% failure rate at home. Higher if I use the crap WD green drives.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Backblaze has done their study in their datacenter. This means they did it in a controlled environment. I'm sorry but I don't have an AC where my computer is... the air is not filtered. my PC is in my basement (as some people put it in a room) where theres 30-40% humidity using normal crappy air i breath like we all do. Some of us (not me) smoke and live in places with lots of humidity or dry air as well. Is this taken into account...nope.
Well this study is to be taken with a grain of salt as lots of variables are missing in their study but it is a good start to know what hard drives last longer under perfect condition
This study was completely useless. WHAT BRAND WERE THEY?! Hitachis and Fujitsus have a higher failure rate by a factor of about ten than a top of the line Seagate drive.
Long hard drives are nice, but Tour golfers realize that accurate chipping and putting is for the dough.
Run the test longer and show us the data for span of 10 years. Additionally, reveal the brands and models of the disks. Thanks.
I worked at an on-line service for several years way back in the late 90s and early 00s and this data is consistent with the data I collected then over perhaps an order of magnitude more units. While 25K drives may not be a lot in the scale of today's internet services it is more than enough to draw statistically valid conclusions, as opposed to that, oh, 1 drive in your desktop gaming system that failed 1 day after the warranty expired.
These are the same stupid fucks that use rubber bands around hard drives in their "SAN" storage.
Given that anything remotely serious is based on the premise that you can't trust your hard drives, is a strategy that makes your HDDs incrementally less trustworthy; but much cheaper, actually 'stupid'?
I wouldn't want to use BackBlaze's 'Pods' on a small scale; because part of their low cost is achieved by moving all the redundancy, fault tolerance, etc. into software (and, for a small shop, paying a bit more for fancy hardware that handles that, along with backups, is cheaper than having a software guru on hand); but on a large scale, making the amount of 'overhead' (ie. dollars worth of hardware purchased to support each disk) as low as possible, and just using software (with its high up-front cost; but zero cost to copy an arbitrary number of times) seems pretty reasonable.
Now, if their arrangement was so dodgy that it was actively murdering drives, that'd be another story; but its thermals and electrical supply are good enough that the drives inside get to fail, or not, the same as though they were in any other enclosure, and these enclosures are crazy cheap, so why not?
So it averages to 12.5 years, not too shabby for a HD.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
With my limited sample of hard drives (around 50 around the years), what I've found so far. The drives range from 1.2GB to 1TB models, SCSI/IDE/SATA
*ALL* but 1 or 2 of my Maxtors either died or sounded like a bandsaw pretty soon
My Seagates are all dead save 1 or 2
My WD seem fine, albeit some are noisy, but my two 1TB green pulled from external cases are pretty much about dead.
I've had only 1 out of 10 SCSI drive die so far.
So my experience so is Maxtor was crap, when Seagate bought them it lowered Seagate's reliability. And since *ALL* the drives I've pulled from enclosures are dead, I'm guessing they are selling their crappiest drives to other manufacturers.
The problem is they are not trying to make better drives, they are trying to make *bigger* drives. Fuck a 4TB drive, gimme a reliable 1TB.
All my obsolete hard drives were dismantled and recycled, and from what I saw, the more recent the drive, the cheaper it's made (and less reliable)
I should've kept statistics while dismantling them.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
The Google report based on many thousands of drives showed that while some MODEL NUMBERS had much higher failure, various brand names had similar failure rates. Western Digital will make two drives at the same time, one model that's very reliable while the one next to it is crap. Same with every other manufacturer.
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf
If you insist on buying based on the brand name, HGST models have been very good in our datacenter.
I've actually had the most luck with refurbished drives. If you find a brand on Newegg that's fairly new, you eliminate the re-furbs that failed due to wear and tear. The ones that are left are DOA drives that got sent back because of common manufacturing flaws. These drives are 100% QC tested and I've yet to have one fail. The awesome kicker is that the stigma of a re-furb virtually guarantees that they'll be cheaper as well.
Common Sense (+1)
Look for a newer model that hasn't been out long enough to have that much wear.
Common Sense (+1)
I think he's saying that if the drive has only been on the market for a couple of months, the wear-and-tear failures haven't had time to happen yet.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If you are sure that they were a relatively new model, and the refurb was a FACTORY refurb, that might be a good method. If Joe Stocking Clerk did the refurb, who knows what you will get.
When installing, and periodically there after, It is wise to run something like smartctl -a /dev/sd? on your drives and check the power on hours and power cycle count. (Not to mention the reallocated sector count and spin retry).
You would be surprised how many refurbs are actually fairly heavily used, with a lot of hours.
My current server's raid array is averaging 5.9 years, but has only seen 53 power cycles over that time. I actually tend to believe (without a great deal of evidence) that power cycles are harder on drives than running constantly.
Google actually did a similar study some years ago. Their study of over 100,000 drives largely agreed with the present study, right down to the three-node distribution of failures over time.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
When I buy a new hard drive, I test it with badblocks, which nowadays seems to take about a week. Something like 20% of the hard drives fail during testing immediately after purchase. Of course they go straight back to the store when this happens.
I'd believe that one for sure. I've had WD Blacks die after swearing by them the previous generation, a couple of the same model. Same with an office setup long ago, 25% failure in a year. No brand has held favor long enough to be useful info to me.
On a sadder note: My faithful Bigfoot drive failed to boot up this weekend, oh well, teenagers are sooo tempramental :(
Happier note: NOS OEM replacement in hand. LOL, long term planning was a tad longer term than expected but still....
Until you put valuable data on it with no backups. Then they fail almost instantly.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.