Slashdot Mirror
Backblaze Dishes On Drive Reliability In their 50k+ Disk Data Center
Online backup provider Backblaze runs hard drives from several manufacturers in its data center (56,224, they say, by the end of 2015), and as you'd expect, the company keeps its eye on how well they work. Yesterday they published a stats-heavy look at the performance, and especially the reliability, of all those drives, which makes fun reading, even if you're only running a drive or ten at home. One upshot: they buy a lot of Seagate drives. Why? A relevant observation from our Operations team on the Seagate drives is that they generally signal their impending failure via their SMART stats. Since we monitor several SMART stats, we are often warned of trouble before a pending failure and can take appropriate action. Drive failures from the other manufacturers appear to be less predictable via SMART stats.
Seagates are great at reporting impending failures.
Does it say Seagate on it? It's about to fail.
Exactly, so even though these are the best large scale numbers we have, they are garbage. We shouldn't use them even though they are the largest sample size. They're useless like the people that carefully compiled these numbers. Instead, we should trust drive manufacturer's marketing numbers, as you suggest.