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Hard Drive Reliability Study Flawed?

Posted by samzenpus on from the on-the-other-hand dept.

storagedude writes "A recent study of hard drive reliability by Backblaze was deeply flawed, according to Henry Newman, a longtime HPC storage consultant. Writing in Enterprise Storage Forum, Newman notes that the tested Seagate drives that had a high failure rate were either very old or had known issues. The study also failed to address manufacturer's specifications, drive burn-in and data reliability, among other issues. 'The oldest drive in the list is the Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drive from 2006. A drive that is almost 8 years old! Since it is well known in study after study that disk drives last about 5 years and no other drive is that old, I find it pretty disingenuous to leave out that information. Add to this that the Seagate 1.5 TB has a well-known problem that Seagate publicly admitted to, it is no surprise that these old drives are failing.'"

5 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. Re:In all fairness by Seta · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Eh, it depends. I've had plenty of bad luck with Seagate's consumer drives dying pretty quickly. On the other hand, I've yet to have to replace a single enterprise ES (or ES2) series drive. We use Seagate's ES series drives in the arrays we depend on and Western Digital black drives in the arrays we don't care too much about (video editing rigs). Though I said, "Don't care too much about", I at least expected them to last more than a few months. Unfortunately, a few months is a tall order for Western Digital. The black drives die so often that their entire warranty department probably knows me by name...

  2. someone got paid by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sorry, you're full of shit Henry Newman. How many people follow specifications about burn-in on a drive when they buy it wholesale OEM and it comes in nothing more than a plastic bag? How many people only buy drives released recently? If you're like most people and you want a 1.5TB drive you go out and buy the cheapest one that meets your needs. If Seagate still has 8 yr old drives on the market, then it's damned right that their failure rate should be considered. And so what if a drive "has a well-known problem that Seagate publicly admitted to"? As long as Seagate publicly admits all the issues with every drive they release we should then adjust stats to eliminate those flaws? That's ridiculous. This study was about "If you go out and buy a drive off the market, this is the rate you can expect it to fail at." I don't think any consumer that got a Seagate drive, had it fail and lose all their data, would then say "Oh! Well they publicly admitted to a problem! Shit! My bad!"

    Sounds like Mr Newman is going to get a nice paycheck soon.

  3. Re:In all fairness by Drew+M. · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've got ~170 failed Seagate Enterprise 500G drives sitting here in my cube. That's pretty close to a 50% failure rate after 4 years of that fleet. Sadly Dell who branded them won't warranty them after 1 year. I'm pretty close to playing hard drive dominoes with them and posting that on youtube. Also noteworthy, we have almost as many Western Digital drives of that same generation with just one failure. Due to this, my company refuses to buy any more Seagates until we see things get better.

  4. Re:Last about five years? by Nuitari+The+Wiz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My experience tends to mirror Backblaze, both with my own personnal business and as an employee at 2 different companies.

    Seagates would always fail prematurely, but usually in a way that is noticeable through SMART monitoring. Interestingly it matches up with when they acquired Maxtor, which also started going bad when they bought Quantum. With my colocated servers for my side business I used to have to go at least twice a month to replace a failed drive. I eventually gave up on Seagate and replaced all but 1 drive (a spare raid member) with a mix of WD and Hitachi. I'm also really pissed at Seagate to have slipped so much in reliability, especially with their 7200.11 and early 7200.12 drives.

    WD would fail sometimes, near when they were new. Where I worked previously, we had a policy of mixing new and old WD drives in a new server. It was a lenghty process but helped avoid losing a simple RAID1 setup.

    Hitachi very good and usually inexpensive.

    Where I'm working now we're trying out Toshiba and so far one drive failed out of 12, but that sample size is way too small and its not been long enough to truly tell how it will go.

  5. Re:In all fairness by Swave+An+deBwoner · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In mid-December 1987, Miniscribe's management, with Wiles' approval and Schleibaum's assistance, engaged in an extensive cover-up which included recording the shipment of bricks as in-transit inventory. To implement the plan, Miniscribe employees first rented an empty warehouse in Boulder, Colorado, and procured ten, forty-eight foot exclusive-use trailers. They then purchased 26,000 bricks from the Colorado Brick Company.

    On Saturday, December 18, 1987, Schleibaum, Taranta, Huff, Lorea and others gathered at the warehouse. Wiles did not attend. From early morning to late afternoon, those present loaded the bricks onto pallets, shrink wrapped the pallets, and boxed them. The weight of each brick pallet approximated the weight of a pallet of disk drives. The brick pallets then were loaded onto the trailers and taken to a farm in Larimer County, Colorado.

    Miniscribe's books, however, showed the bricks as in-transit inventory worth approximately $4,000,000. Employees at two of Miniscribe's buyers, CompuAdd and CalAbco, had agreed to refuse fictitious inventory shipments from Miniscribe totaling $4,000,000. Miniscribe then reversed the purported sales and added the fictitious inventory shipments into the company's inventory records.

    Find the full text here: http://www.justice.gov/osg/briefs/1996/w961430w.txt

    Now, though, Seagate is not Miniscribe.