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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.
Can anyone tell me how this affects anyone? A billion hours is a ridiculous amount of time that makes this irrelevant to any reasonable person. No one cares if a hard drive lasts a billion hours.
...can these statistics be used to find parcel trowing delivery drivers???
HGST is owned by WD now if I recall, so it's not Japanese anymore. (Sorry if somebody already mentioned this.)
it puzzles me why they aren't running red pros, which have almost twice the warranty, the vanilla reds do suck in terms of reliability
What the fuck is this company doing using consumer hard drives in a goddamn data center? These drives are only meant to be powered on a few hours a day and consumer workload duty cycles, not 24/7 in a constantly-churning server environment. Of course they're going to drop like flies - they are being deliberately misused in a manner inconsistent with their design goals.
And, of course these drives are "crash happy," especially in servers, because they are non-RAID drives with a long timeout for unrecoverable read errors. So, they will fall out of an array every time there's a URE.
I laughed hysterically at the torch and pitchfork response to that whole mess, when nobody bothered to lift a brain cell to look at the situation critically.
Good god! opening that webpage is like walking trough treacle. I had to turn on Ghostery - 25 trackers!!
I think the author of the summary is mixing up the results for Seagate and WD.
From the summary:
That drive isn't even in the table in the report. It's the 4TB drives that pull Seagate's rating down.
Also, looking at the graph by manufacturer and year, it looks like it is Seagate that improved much the last year, not WD. And it's Seagate that comes out third for 2016 in that graph, while WD is last, not the other way around.
From TFS:
Backblaze also notes that the 8.63% failure rate on the Toshiba 3TB is misleadingly high — the company has just 45 of those drives, and one of them happened to fail.
Wut?
As they note, one of their drives has an 8% annual failure rate because they have 45 and one happened to fail this quarter. A lot of the others are similar numbers, with the difference between 0 and 1 failures being 4-8%. The only ones where they have enough data to be useful are HGS, one WD, and two Seagate models. One Seagate is a lot less reliable than most HGST drives (and less reliable than the worst HGST model), the other is the most reliable disk in the set. The WD drive is the least reliable.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
when they sold out to Western Digital. This is the kind of thing they could capitalize on, to have the absolutely highest quality storage drives available. Anyway, what's clear from these charts is that the American products are of the lowest quality, and if quality is what you want, in general you buy Japanese or German.
Not only have Seagate chained themselves to the declining HDD market, apparently happy with their inevitable fate of oblivion, but they can't even get that right! Their HDDs are totally crap as well.
== Jez ==
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Four years ago, when I bought my old laptop, there were so many with 1 tb hard drives, although a bit expensive. That one died on me (not the hard drive, but the hinge snapped) and so I went to look for s new laptop. Turns out we've regressed, and now laptop hard drives are only a fraction of what they used to be at double the price, all for a tiny bit of speed and thinness. Fucking bullshit, I say.
Please mod down. Do not click that link. It's a troll cleverly disguising a goatsex link.
wo8k that You
Funny how the industry is still making excuses for Seagate.
Worst crap in the industry for over 20 years.
I have an SGI Octane @ work with 15K Cheetahs that hasn't been shut off since 2003.
And not some news website which doesn't even have the courtesy to provide a link to the actual source report.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/
It includes historical models as well as statistical confidence intervals - very useful for determining which model drive is more reliable. I know everyone wants to use an easy rule like "Seagate bad" when buying, but it's not that simple. Each new model of drive includes new design changes to try to increase capacity, improve speed and reliability, and/or reduce cost. Sometimes these design changes work, sometimes they don't and the model is less reliable (e.g. Samsung 840 EVO). The statistics have the greatest orthogonality when broken down by model, not by manufacturer.
So they label the data table as being for the first quarter 2016, but then for some inexplicable reason they change the failure rate to be annual? Are they using historical or projected data? Why skew the failure rate?
And then the bar graph - failure rates by manufacturer. How are they getting this data? For example, 2016 for HGST they list a failure rate of 1.03%, but that isn't borne out in the table data. The table data suggests only a 0.2% failure rate (44 failures / 22731 drives).
This is NOT the first report in which HGST hard drives resulted to be the most reliable, and very much not the first report where Seagate came dead last in reliability. In fact Seagate's unreliability is becoming legendary.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
not even once, and i run seagates everywhere and even an old maxtor 80gig drive on a 2002 desktop i use for torrenting, then again all have a fan for cooling and none use those fancy alternate power states in which the computer isnt on, but isnt off either, im not a faggot here, i like women with big titties and binary power states
but if you are running a seagate 3tb drive thats a monstrosity with 4 plates and 5 heads or whatever, or a model thats been on the market for 2 months and you love to put it to sleep and wake it up again until the firmware craps on you, you are dumb, and probably a faggot too
This data is only for a 91 day period. To actually be useful, data should be presented for a rolling 6M, 1Y, 2Y and 3Y periods of time, or at least for however long they keep drives in service. They should also include mean and median age of the group of drives. Perhaps Backblaze has that info elsewhere but nothing like it in the article.
Aside from comments on specific models and specific manufacturers, has anyone else noticed the downward trend?
I wonder if this is due to more careful selection or (except in the case of Seagate which is quite obvious) the manufacturers are actually getting better, or age related issues in the way the stats are reported.
You were lucky to get a year out of one of their drives.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
In case ExtremeTech is listening, I added them to my hosts file (several months back) and now never go there any more. Used to be worth a periodic visit...
I come here for the love
A billion hours is 114 thousand years
civilization didnt exist that long ago
at least on this planet
even if they tested a thousand drives for 114 years that would still be amazing. what sort of hard drives were around in 1902 ?
I know it's a reliability report, but shouldn't drive warranties be considered?
If a drive is still under warranty, do I really care if it fails at time X versus 2*X? Rather than choosing a drive based on overall reliability, shouldn't I make the decision based on reliability after the warranty period has elapsed?
I realize advertising is king here, but a link to the original and far more detailed report would have been nice. https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
Does it really pay off in the long-run to buy lower quality drives?
For example, a 5400 RPM 4 TB WD Blue (desktop) drive is $130 with a 2-year warranty. The 4 TB WD Gold (datacenter) is $264 with a 5-year warranty, but spins faster and has twice as much cache. The more expensive drive is slightly cheaper per warranty-year and provides more IOPS, but does draw almost 4 Watts more power when active.
Without knowing how long the drives last beyond their warranty period, which the Backblaze report doesn't mention, isn't it less risky to buy the more expensive drive?
Bull and Sh*t!!! I'm a 20 year technician and I can tell you that HGST is HORRIBLE! They die for no reason, and when they die, it's usually a total loss. Seagate on the other hand has served me well for years. I have 80GB Seagate drives that are close to 15 years old still humming away. When a seagate drive starts to go, you get a lot of warning. The SMART data will be flagged, and they usually start to develop bad blocks over time. Re-allocate the bad blocks and transfer the data to another drive. I can not even begin to guess how many HGST drives I see that are DOA. I would NEVER buy HGST crap!
> If a drive is still under warranty, do I really care if it fails at time X versus 2*X?
I certainly do. Buying the drive costs maybe $130. Compare the cost to handle a failure:
Having a tech pull the pod, hook it up to the pod tester to find the bad drive, run that drive through the test sequence to prove (to the manufacturer) that it really is bad, fill out the RMA request, box it up and ship it, put a replacement drive in the pod, reinstall and activate the pod, handle receipt of new drive later.
Handling costs of a failure (under warranty or not) is probably $200. That's more significant than the purchase cost of a drive that's out of warranty.
The above description is for Backblaze. In my case, the procedure for a failed disk starts with "drive over to the datacenter". It ends with "hope that the firmware on the replacement drive doesn't have any glitches in my environment". I don't want to drive over there and deal with it. I'm more interested in drives that don't fail than drives that will be replaced under warranty.
On a local PC, the process probably begins with "hope that the backups worked correctly last night, and that nothing goes wrong with the restore".