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Hard Drive Reliability Study Flawed?
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.'"
Is he saying that 1.5TB drives are all 5 years old? If you look at the table in TFA, it talks about "release date" -- which may well be some time ago, but I'm sure 1.5TB drives may had new, even if the design hasn't changed in a while.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I have an 80 GB IDE hard drive in my old desktop machine that's still alive and kicking from - I'm not even sure how old it is. At least 10 years, I'd say. I use it for temporary storage.
Back in '99 we used to get factory sealed boxes of Seagate drives DOA, or already having cluster collapse. There's nothing quite like 250-500+ brand new units which are all dead or dying, and then shipping them back. I've only started using Seagate again in the last few years.
Om, nomnomnom...
I've either personally owned or purchased for companies I've worked for dozens of hard drives of all (except ESDI) technologies including MFM/RLL, IDE (parallel and serial), SCSI (original, wide, ultra wide, etc.) of form factors from full height 5.25 inch to 2.5 inch, dating back to 1991, and in my experience most hard drives last until you throw them away after 10 or 15 years because they're too small.
A few hard drives die in the first 6 months, and maybe 5-10% die in 3-5 years. Saying that disk drives last about 5 years just doesn't agree with my experience at all. Hard drives essentially last an infinite amount of time, defined by me as until they're so small that their storage can be replaced for under a dollar.
I do agree with the author's other points. Certain lines of hard drives have more like a 100% failure rate after 5 years. One 250 GB hard drive I purchased was RMA replaced with a 300 GB model because the 250 GB line was essentially faulty.
I think these studies might be looking at 7200 or 10000 RPM SCSI units under extremely high use. That's not how consumers use hard drives.
Someones working overtime to make seagate look good.
But the pile of dead seagates at work says otherwise.
Yeah, this guy is essentially saying the pre-known facts validate this research finding so therefore the research was deeply flawed.
It really doesn't matter what the accumulated knowledge over the intervening years says, the facts remain that for this user, Blackblaze, the results were the results, and it happened to match what the industry already knew.
Their results: Hitachi has the lowest overall failure rate (3.1% over three years). Western Digital has a slightly higher rate (5.2%), but the drives that fail tend to do so very early. Seagate drives fail much more often — 26.5% are dead by the three-year mark."
If anything, this guy just validated Blackblaze's study,
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Who cares about known issues. If I buy a hard drive and two years from now it has a 'known issue', then I would much rather not buy it in the first place.
BS. I have had at least 2/3 of my newer seagates fail. From 500 gigs to 2TB drives. At LEAST 10 in the last 3 years. In the same time I have had 1 of 6 hitachi and 2 of 18 western digital. I will NEVER buy another seagate drive. Just lost my external 1.5TB USB3 drives go last week with 0 warning and TON of my data. I hate seagate with a passion that I feel for no other.
My understanding based upon reading the originally posted materials was that they published their reliability findings based upon their own experience. I did not see anywhere that they claimed that it was comprehensive research into the reliability of hard drives. We should not crap upon backblaze because people could not be bothered to read the articles and made some faulty assumptions based upon the headlines, to do so would just serve to dissuade others from releasing their experiences. As for the argument about some of the hardware having known faults... If a company does not want bad press they should do more quality control before releasing crappy hardware...
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
Or a bad batch?
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...
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.
If the entire box is dead, wouldn't that imply mishandling during shipping?
Bad batches during production. Seagate used to be famous for this, and if you look back at their 90's financials you can see that for quite a while they were hanging on from folding by the edge of their teeth.
Om, nomnomnom...
This article states everything anyone competent already knew. Consumer drives come rated for a lighter workload than enterprise.
Duh? That's the point - it's a cost:reliability tradeoff. With "enterprise" drives being 1.5x+ the expense, for uses like Backblaze where you can survive multiple disk failures with ease it's a no-brainer.
I also got "burned" by these Seagate 1.5TB disks. By *far* the worst drives we have in production (~300 or so these days), and they have had an annual failure rate around 20% since the day they were put into service. Other consumer drives don't even come close to that metric, but are rated similarly.
I actually like Seagate - every disk manufacturer has problematic models from time to time. No big deal, we knew the risks when we bought them. However, the data Backblaze published is completely validated by our own internal data. It's a drive model to avoid when at all possible. Most of our disks have a less than 5% annual failure rate, but this specific model is close to, or over, 20%. That's a major difference.
This article just states the obvious. Consumer drives generally fail earlier under heavy loads. This is not interesting, it's a known tradeoff anyone with a high school degree can figure out for themselves by looking at cycle ratings and MTBF. The only thing I care about for this workload, is if my failure rate exceeds the savings I get from utilizing the lesser drives. The answer has thus far (even with 20% of drives failing each year) been a resounding yes.
There is a difference between consumer drives, data like this is *great* to have published as it can add to your own data and you can compare notes. Will I make a buying decision based off it? Probably not. But it will certainly be one data point of many when it comes time to buy more disk. Known issue? I don't care. All I care about is if the drive works or not, and this particular Seagate model does not. The author of this article completely glances over the fact Seagate admitted to the issue, but did absolutely *nothing* to make it right for their customers essentially blaming them. This fact is what bothers me the most, not the fact they had a problematic drive model - and will likely be the largest factor when it comes to my evaluating Seagate products in the future.
Or a bad batch?
No, of course not. This is /. It must be that a major hard drive manufacturer that was around 20+ years prior, and is still around 14 years later made nothing but bricks and packaged them as hard drives. That's how they survived when so many of their competitors went bankrupt. Bricks are so much cheaper to produce, so the profit margin is considerably higher. ;-)
Install that drive in a server in an online backup company and see how long it lasts.
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.
Yes. They are getting cheaper and faster. They are already much faster than magnetic rotating discs in read/write/iops.
Don't be facetious, you can't get a 1TB SSD for 100$ yet and you know this. The OP clearly wrote "getting cheaper", he didn't say they have parity on price.
The reliability rate for current generation SSDs is now higher than traditional HDDs. So in regards to " run 24hours/24hours for 5 years without any problems ?", take your pick, they can all do it better than a traditional HDD.
I think traditional HDDs have precious few years left.
People seem to forget that Seagate denied the issue for almost a year.
I remember.
I was a seagate buyer, before they lied. It was my preferred vendor. We had a number of drives in disk arrays, but when it was time to swap them out, I avoided Seagate as replacements. Never had any data loss due to Seagate drives, but the company was a client of the software my team wrote for enterprise customers, so I did get a view on the edges of the company. Something changed.
Last year, those drives were 6 yrs old and had never gave us any issues, but old drives can't be trusted. The new drives were Hitachi - because I can read reliability reports. I'm still using the old Seagate for unimportant things from time to time. Mainly transporting large amounts of data. No issues and if there are any at this point, the old drives have exceeded expectations.
However, I don't plan to buy another Seagate drive again. They lied! Didn't step up and tell the truth. That is a management issue, not technical, and I remember it. It was a management failure. I will always remember it and were I work (BTW, I'm a CIO) - we will never buy Seagate drives again, if there is a choice.
Life and work is too important to deal with liars.
'The oldest drive in the list is the Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drive from 2006. A drive that is almost 8 years old!
I recently had a 1.5TB drive die and it was still new enough to be under warranty. Seagate shipped a 2TB as a replacement.
Find the full text here: http://www.justice.gov/osg/briefs/1996/w961430w.txt
Now, though, Seagate is not Miniscribe.
I like it that Newman complains of "lack of intellectual rigor" then mentions a "known problem" as an excuse for eliminating from the study the 1.5TB Seagate drives. Except that according to Seagate, the known problem with this series "does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive". Additionally, the "known problem" was for firmware versions SD15, SD17 & SD18. Did Mr. Newman have the "intellectual rigor" to check if the tested drives were having one of the affected firmware versions?
We have well over 150 3TB Seagate Barracuda's at work that are halfway into their second year of operation. The first year has been pretty flawless, maybe 1 failure, but the second year, we've had about 15 already get peppered with bad sectors and its continuing to happen at least once per week or so on more drives. This hands a lot of crediblity to Backblazes findings if you ask me. Again these are modern 3TB Barracuda's, (non-XT) I was sad when they discontued the XT line, simply because we have about 30 of the XT 2TB models into their 3rd year and no failures yet. Oh, right, they didn't discontinue the XT at all, rather turned it into the Constellation series and sold it for double the price!
This reflects my anecdotal experience of late as well. My Dell server just turned 3 years old (and I had a 3 year service agreement on it). It came with three 1-terabyte drives. All failed before my service period ended and were replaced; the last of the three was replaced this past summer. 100% failure of the original drives in less than 3 years.
The only thing I found flawed in the study was how many seagate drives actually made it through the warranty period.
My personal experience shows a failure rate of seagate drives at around 300-400%(pool of 20-30 drives). What I am saying is that not only did the original drives fail, but the "refurbished" replacements failed as well, numerous times. Not a single drive got through warranty without the nice green border. The amount I spent on advanced replacements could have bought me quite a few new drivers from another vendor.
I no longer buy seagate drives. I do not have any abnormal failure rates on the other brands I use.
No kidding. My employer has a data recovery division and the guys who run it have some pretty well-informed opinions of which drives blow and which drives don't as much. Bottom line: no matter how awesome your storage is, back it up!
No.
Henry Newman's response, however, is deeply flawed.
1) Newman complains that average drive age is a "useless statistic." But he seems to prefer "time since product release" which is far worse than useless -- it is an obviously incorrect way to estimate the age of a drive population and is directly contradicted by the average age data reported in the blog post.
2) Newman has questions about Backblaze's burn in. He can find answers by googling "Backblaze burn in" to learn more about the company's remarkably transparent operations. Beach does not go into these details because an effective blog post will focus on its key conclusions rather than discussing every detail of methodology. It is not a research paper.
3) Newman digresses into hard error rate which is unrelated to drive failures. I look forward to a future Backblaze blog post about error rates. In any case since all these drives are consumer drives and all but one have the same specified error rate it is a non-sequiter.
4) Newman points out that Backblaze probably vastly exceeds manufacturer specs for drive throughput. I think this is exactly the point. Is there really enough difference in reliability between commodity and enterprise drives to justify their price difference? Or is it just a form of price discrimination? Does the spec sheet reflect reality or is it a marketing-driven fiction?
Overall this article strikes me as being written by an industry flack: someone who is more interested in parroting jargon and received wisdom rather than indulging in genuine curiosity.
Install that drive in a server in an online backup company and see how long it lasts.
Probably longer, since once the drive is filled with data, it basically just sits there spinning. Sure, there might be a patrol read of the disk every month or so, but no real work.
I expect that almost all my drives in server environments would be running fine at 8-10 years, but most get replaced after about 6 simply because bigger drives are so much cheaper at that point.
He seems to be trying his best to find flaws in the study, but his own logic is pretty poor. For instance.
"I’ve noted that we just found that the Seagate 1.5 TB drives are about 8 years old since release, for the failure rate, but the average age of the Seagate drives in use are 1.4 years old. Averages are pretty useless statistic, and if Seagate drives are so bad then why buy so many new drives?"
If the company began rolling out Seagates for 3 years at 5k a year and stopped after three years because of the high failure rate, moving on to Hitachi and such, then the average age even over 8 years could very well be only 1.4 years. Because, let's face it, when it's your ass on the line and you see a particular type of drive putting your servers into a precarious state, you might start migrating away as fast as you can.
Those Seagate drives still running are probably either running in very low IO servers or very low-risk servers (clustered or such), but in such few quantities that their continued lifespans are not increasing the overall average much. The remainder could be shelved to avoid the risk of failing in a critical system and while they are listed in the total number of drives purchased, their age might not be included in the average presented.
SSD is getting cheaper and faster every day.
You know whats getting cheaper? TLC flash, the kind that degrades WHEN YOU READ IT, the kind that has internal read counter and needs to be written again after a certain number of reads to level cell voltages, the kind that has ~300 writes life span. Its designed to DIE no matter what you do with it.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I've had similar experience. I've had about 15 Seagate drives and none of them have ever died. I've had 3 WD drives, 2 died within a year and the third one almost made it 2 years.
I haven't met anyone personally that has had problems with Seagate drives, but I have heard people claim it online. Maybe I'm just lucky or something.
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I have an 80gb ide deskstar that runs as primary storage for my DNS, key, and SSH jump box for my home network.
Theolder a drive gets, you need to put it into higher positions of authority and privilege due to its years of experience. It inverts the failure rate (which is mainly from burnout and boredom of routine).
Can't give exact numbers as I only worked in an IT role where I was dealing with largish storage for a couple years (2006-2008) ~200TB spinning disk on ~400 disks in a dozen or so raid arrays. Anyways: failures seemed fairly clustered. We'd lose a drive in an array get the replacement then a month later the same chassis would lose another drive. It might have been power supply stressed the drives, it might have been for whatever reason those disks where getting hit harder over time than other arrays, might have been the load of doing the rebuild or just that they were in the same stripe set so getting similar load, similar/same batch of drives since they came together. How knows? Anyways, server load might have a longer MTA but intrachassis failure rates seem to be from my (albeit limited) experience highly correlated.
A while ago I bought three of their HDDs...and somehow within a month seven of them failed. Not only that, a friend of mine tried to top off a rack of Seagate hybrid SSDs with unleaded and the whole server just burst into flames on the spot.
Please play hard drive dominos and post to YouTube and /.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
IIRC Backblaze's workload is write once read maybe once (I mean, they are a backup company). So it's quite likely that they are massively under the specs for throughput.
The truly interesting thing about this study is that they name names; previous work in the area (lke Bianca Schroeder's FAST 07 paper, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bianca/... or Google's FAST 07 paper, http://research.google.com/arc..., or NetApp's FAST 08 paper http://www.usenix.org/event/fa...) doesn't give away vendor names. The Backblaze results broadly agree with the previous results.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Seagate absorbed Miniscribe by way of Maxtor. I wouldn't be so sure that 'shipping bricks' isn't in their patent portfolio.
Since most /. folks weren't even alive back then, let me recap a few of Miniscribe's business tactics:
- Set up off-the-books companies to which they "sold" drives that were simply stored in warehouses.
- Claimed the sale of drives which had not yet been delivered to customers. Their outside auditors called them out on the fact that they couldn't claim the income from drives that were still on the boat from China, and made them restate earnings. When it all fell apart, the criminal investigation discovered that the drives had never even existed to begin witth.
- Took returned dead disk drives, tossed them onto a pile in the office which was nicknamed the "dog pile", and when the pile got big enough, packed them up and shipped them out as new orders.
So no, Seagate is nothing at all like Miniscribe ;-)
Meantime, I had absolutely horrible experiences with the 3TB ES drives. It varies.
I'm not quite clear what general conclusion the author was going for here, but I take it that one thing he wants to convey is that it would be irrational for a person to consult this data when making purchasing decisions for desktop drives. I don't think he's quite made the point. For one, how does the fact that Seagate admitted to their being a problem with one of their drives make the failure rate of that drive irrelevant? If a car company made a model that tended to fall apart or malfunction due to a systemic problem with one of its systems, this seems like a relevant (though hardly conclusive) reason to think twice about buying a car from that manufacturer. Second, just because the ST31500341AS was first released in 2006, it doesn't follow that the drives Backblaze has are that old. Their average age is only 3.8 years. As you can see from the data (from the chart in the actual Backblaze post, not the one produced in this article), WD greens with an average of 4.4 years fared much better (though the sample is smaller). In fact, they fared better than every other Seagate drive in that table, even the younger ones. I take the point about the amount of IO, but wouldn't it be kind of surprising if these storage pods didn't evenly distribute data? Not doing so would be rather silly. While the specifications say that these Seagates shouldn't be used in high vibration environments, the same is true of the WD drives that performed better. That they handle vibration better seems to me a good indication of long-term reliability in less harsh environments, given that heat and vibration are the killers even there, despite thie not being as extreme. Again, if a car from one manufacturer fares better in tests that push it beyond its intended limits than those from another manufacturer, this seems like relevant information for a consumer looking to buy a car and keep it long-term. I think the author's washing machine analogy speaks to this point. If a laundromat published this kind of data on the failure rate of consumer-grade laundry machines in its laundromats, it seems to me that the fact that one did better than another is a good (though perhaps not decisive) reason for thinking that one of the kind that fared better will last longer in my home than the other. Given the lack of other data out there on failure rates, this is the best information we consumers have, though more information of the type the author is asking for would help to make our future purchasing decisions more informed. What the author needs to show that this limited data is so limited that it is as good as no data, but I don't see that he's done that.
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...
I've had enterprise Seagate drives die on me before. The failure rate is definitely much lower though. One of the reasons, but not he only one, that enterprise drives last is because they are in a temperature and humidity controlled environment. Just remember, though, if you ever have a cooling failure in your server room, expect to replace a bunch of drives over the next year.
One of the patterns I've noticed with Seagate is that drive failures seem to spike when manufacturing moves. The reliable Barracuda IV models made in Singapore were replaced by shoddy ones made by newer facilities in Thailand. Then around 2009-2010 they shifted a lot more manufacturing into China, and from that period the Thailand drives were now the more reliable ones from the mature facility. A lot of the troubled 1.5TB 7200.11 models came out of that, and perhaps some of your 500GB enterprise drives too.
If you think about this in terms of individual plants being less reliable when new, that would explain why manufacturers go through cycles of good and bad. I think buying based on what's been good the previous few years is troublesome for a lot of reasons. From the perspective of the manufacturer, if a plant is above target in terms of reliability, it would be tempting to cut costs there. Similarly, it's the shoddy plants that are likely to be improved because returns are costing from there are costing too much. There's a few forces here that could revert reliability toward the mean, and if that happens buying the company that's been the best recently will give you the worst results.
At this point I try to judge each drive model individually, rather than to assume any sort of brand reliability.
Recent reliability testing has been downright horrifying for the TLC based drives. I predict a whole lot of people buying Samsung 840 drives because they're cheap are going to regret that.
Well I go through a lot of drives at the shop and while I haven't had a chance to try the new 4Tb I can say their 1Tb, 1.5Tb, and 2Tb had a LOT of fails, enough that I actively avoid them now. Rumor has it that its caused by Maxtor shitty ARM chips and lousy firmware but that's rumor so who knows if its true.
From what I've seen, in order from least failures to most, Samsung (especially Ecogreens, they just seem to last and last), Hitachi, WD, and finally Seagate. Maybe their business side is better but on the consumer side their 500Gb drives are good but anything bigger than the 640Gb just seem to die.
Sadly it really doesn't matter now that Samsung and Hitachi have had their drive business bought by Seagate and WD so if you need real storage space? Gotta pick one of the other. The WD blues and greens seem to be decent ATM and the red NAS drives make good storage for HTPCs.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I've used a number of different brands (mostly WD and Seagate for ye olde mechanical disk, although I've got some old Hitachi's and an ancient Quantum somewhere) and I found it doesn't really matter what brand you use.
Pick the one that's got the performance or capacity you want and the price you like.
If your data is that critical, you shouldn't be relying on one storage system for it anyway (RAID, then HDD backed up to a different system such as tape, or at least a different HDD based system). Nor should you have drives with the same batch number in the same array.
In that regard I consider all drives to be moments away from failure and plan accordingly. Of course in real life, most drives last years (aforementioned Quantum still runs). The worst thing that can happen is you get drives from a bad batch, which is why you should never have drives from the same batch in the same array.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Although the 840 Series is clearly in worse shape than the competition, these results need to be put into context. 500TB works out to 140GB of writes per day for 10 years. That's an insane amount even for power users, and it far exceeds the endurance specifications of our candidates.
Seems like it's not as bad as you make it out, I don't think i'd be using a 'puny' 250gb drive in 10yrs much like I don't use 250gb HDDs now that drives over 1TB are around. 1TB SSDs are already around the $500 mark and after ~5 yrs I think they'll be quite affordable.
Have you metaroderated recently?
I don't know the particular methodologies used.
Reported mtbf for SSDs is higher than regular HDDs.
I can't remember where but there was a recent release of stats from a data center (similar to the stats in question) that had SSDs vs HDDs and the SSDs came out on top for reliability.
I think a major factor that makes SSDs more reliable is that they are not sensitive to shock or vibration - so in a laptop/tablet/phone dominated world, you will have much higher reliability with SSDs than traditional HDDs.
The data from the Blackblaze study is fine, it's not flawed, it's real. The issue is how it's being interpreted and the conclusions drawn from it and also with the lack of more data such as how old were the drives that failed vs. the one that were being "very reliable" etc...
Just last December of 2013, we have purchased around 200 Toshiba (but are the same Hitachi/HGST drives before) and 250 Seagate drives (500GB). There were no DOA for Hitachi drives and there were a couple for the Seagate. After around a month, so far only Seagate has been sent for warranty.
Previously we have purchased around 350 Hitachi/HGST drives (500GB) and the failure rate is definitely less than 5% per annum in a span of around 3 years. I haven't proceed warranty of around 50 pcs. Probably it will be somewhere around 35 pcs.
In our near-line storage environment, we also had WD (1TB), Hitachi (2TB), and Seagate (1TB, 1.5TB, 3TB.) I have the following observations:
1. Enterprise drives (Seagate 1TB SAS) had similar failure rates than regular drives. We have 7 out of 10 in a span of around 5 years.
2. Eight Hitachi 2TB drives are still working well after 2-3 years without failure.
3. Seagate 1.5TB (7200.11) drives are around 3-4 years old where around 6 out of 26 drives are already dead.
4. WD Black 1TB drives are around 4-5 years old and that we have 13 out of 16 still working.
5. Seagate 3TB (SV35) drives are just over one year old and we have 2 out of 24 fail after the one year.
Statistically, the failure rates that is observed are similar to what we are getting. Unfortunately here, we can no longer get Hitachi drives per se since they became Western Digital and locally it is not promoted anymore. We are sticking with Toshiba but I hope they are able to maintain it.
Note: All drives are 7200RPM
What kind of BS test result analysis is that? Of course, reallocated sectors will rise in such a test pretty soon. The important thing to know is a) is the drive honest and b) where is the limit where data-loss or other failures will happen? From the data given, it is not possible to deduce that the Samsung TLC drives have a problem, just that Samsung is careful. It may also well be that for TLC they simply use a different strategy, namely less ECC per sector and more spare sectors. They may also replace earlier just to be sure.
So, no, before they observe a failure, they have shown absolutely nothing.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You do support and you just bring them to your desk for the last four years and just pile them up? How many monitors, keyboards, and memory dimms do you have stacked on your desk?
Monitors, Keyboards and DIMMs don't store confidential information which requires proper disposal.
Several years ago I worked for a company which handled financial data for several big banks. We were contractually bound to dispose of all storage media in the most destructive and showy manner possible so that there would be no chance of information being leaked. Since nobody wanted to go to the expense of shredding, crushing and atomizing the things the moment they were pulled we just tossed them into a bin in a secure storage room and left them there until we could destroy them all at once. After about a year we had almost a hundred failed and retired drives all go into a wood chipper together.
And they weren't even "honourable" crooks. Some of the people that helped load the bricks onto the pallets where laid of right after shortly before Christmas. Duh. Of course when someone gets sacked right after helping the boss break the law, there is only one possible outcome. The boss will get ratted out.
Reallocated sectors indicate things are starting to go wrong with the drive, and those skyrocket starting at only 100TB of writes.. Admittedly they're busy servers, but I do have systems on SSD I've measured hitting 75TB of writes in only a year of heavy use. And while extremely heavy on writes, this test rig is pretty simple compared to the mess real world drives go through. As my parent post pointed out, there's more to TLC wear than just writes, and it's not hard at all to imagine workloads that will start hitting reallocations in a small number of years. Any amount of reallocation is scary when one potential outcome from wear is forgetting your data.