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.

Comments

Re:RAID, let them fail

[Dareth]

The purpose of RAID is to keep data available for a purpose. You have some level of redundancy measured in terms of number of disk that can fail before you have a data loss for the array. Once a disk has an impending failure smart alert, you no longer have full confidence in that disk. If you leave it to fail, what if another disk in the array happens to fail. You now have an array with a failed disk, possibly in a degraded mode. You also have a disk with a better than normal chance of failure. It just makes sense to be proactive and fix the issue before it escalates into a failure.