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Backblaze Releases Billion-Hour Hard Drive Reliability Report (extremetech.com)
jones_supa writes: The storage services provider Backblaze has released its reliability report for Q1/2016 covering cumulative failure rates of mechanical hard disk drives by specific model numbers and by manufacturer. The company noted that as of this quarter, its 60,000 drives have cumulatively spun for over one billion hours (100,000 years). Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) is the clear leader here, with an annual failure rate of just 1% for three years running. The second position is also taken by a Japanese company: Toshiba. Third place goes to Western Digital (WD), with the company's ratings having improved in the past year. Seagate comes out the worst, though it is suspected that much of that rating was warped by the company's crash-happy 3 TB drive (ST3000DM001). Backblaze notes that 4 TB drives continue to be the sweet spot for building out its storage pods, but that it might move to 6, 8, or 10 TB drives as the price on the hardware comes down.
Ever price out "enterprise" drives?
When you're buying 10 drives, you pay the premium because man-hours to deal with failures are expensive. When you're buying 10,000? Not so much because failures are built into the design at that scale.
At the scale Backblaze operates, it's cheaper to build redundant systems that can handle consumer drive failures and just buy twice as many drives.
Depends on your use case: the Backblaze people are operating a system specifically designed for cheapo drives that are expected to have a fairly high chance of falling over and dying(pragmatically speaking, that's part of why they are so nice and friendly about drive reliability data and sharing the designs for their 'pods': their real asset as a company is the software sauce that allows them to offer cheap, reliable, storage through software-level redundancy on top of a pile of low-end drives packed tight and connected with really cheap HBAs and SATA port multipliers: no fancy hardware RAID, no redundant-controller SAS, etc.)
If you are buying drives to use as the boot volume for computers that only get a single HDD, or even systems with small RAID arrays, you are going to be seriously inconvenienced by drive models that drop dead atypically fast, even if you save a few bucks upfront. Re-imaging a replacement drive or swapping out a failed RAID disk and rebuilding the volume take time and trouble.
If your purposes are very similar to theirs, then your sensitivity to failure is lower and getting a slightly better deal per GB might start to make sense; but you have to be pretty failure insensitive(or the price of reliability really steep) to be in the same boat.
No, it will affect you if you choose to ignore the results and buy a *3TB* Seagate drive.
When will people stop picking stupid manufacturer sides when it comes to drive reliability? It has nothing to do with manufacturers and everything to do with models. *Every* drive maker has put out shitty models that fail in dumb ways, from HGST (ex-IBM)'s DeathStars to Samsung's firmware fail (I still own a bunch of HD204UIs with an unfixed firmware bug that eats data if you dare use SMART self-tests) to Seagate's 3TB failures. Picking manufacturer sides just means you'll get hit whenever they make the next broken drive.
If you actually look at their per-drive stats, you'll see that Seagate's 4TB drive is, so far, *more* reliable than WD's current drives. I have a bunch of those and they're mostly running fine - though I had one drop off the controller last weekend (came back after reboot), first failure in years, I need to look into that. We'll see. Right now, 4TB Seagates seem to be the best bang per buck with decent reliability. Next year it might be another brand/drive.