8TB Drives Are Highly Reliable, Says Backblaze (yahoo.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Yahoo News: Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze has published its hard drive stats for Q2 2016. Yahoo News reports: "The report is based on data drives, not boot drives, that are deployed across the company's data centers in quantities of 45 or more. According to the report, the company saw an annualized failure rate of 19.81 percent with the Seagate ST4000DX000 4TB drive in a quantity of 197 units working 18,428 days. The next in line was the WD WD40EFRX 4TB drive in a quantity of 46 units working 4,186 days. This model had an annualized failure rate of 8.72 percent for that quarter. The company's report also notes that it finally introduced 8TB hard drives into its fold: first with a mere 45 8TB HGST units and then over 2,700 units from Seagate crammed into the company's Blackblaze Vaults, which include 20 Storage Pods containing 45 drives each. The company moved to 8TB drives to optimize storage density. According to a chart provided in the report, the 8TB drives are highly reliable. The HGST HDS5C8080ALE600 worked for 22,858 days and only saw two failures, generating an annualized failure rate of 3.20 percent. The Seagate ST8000DM002 worked for 44,000 days and only saw four failures, generating an annual failure rate of 3.30 percent." For comparison, Backblaze's reliability report for Q1 2016 can be found here.

UPDATE 8/2/16: Corrected Seagate Model "DT8000DM002" to "ST8000DM002."

Comments

Re:High failure rate

[waveclaw]

If only that blackbaze pods were even remotely like other datacenter equipment. As far as vibration is concerned they are still pretty much a torture test for anything with a spinning motor. Minimal vibration protection while being mechanically coupled to a weak foundation while crammed in as tightly as geometry allows.

A temperature-controlled environment, clean power, low shock and vibration, and 1 out of 5 still fails

The density and structure of a pod is only temperature-controlled in that it is going to get hot, quickly.

Remind me never to buy Seagate.

The numbers from Backblaze you'll actually see that you shouldn't buy one particular desktop model of hard drive for your "datacenter." Numbers like Backblaze releases are quite fascinating in that you can analyze them. You can find which models at any vendor to prefer or avoid.

Oh, wait, I already vowed never to buy another Seagate- about 10 years ago after experiencing their unequaled propensity to die fast and hard.

Sorry to hear about your loss. I hope you kept backup copies. If not, I hope it taught you that if you don't have a copy then you don't have a backup.

It is certainly reasonable to avoid a vendor when a lot of their products from many lines have defects at a given time. Seagate's desktop line certainly took a hit from the initial Backblaze numbers. The DM1000's huge failure rate is almost as legendary as the IBM Death Star line or Maxtor click-of-death. But stuff from before or after a given run may have better or worse quality. And of course even manufactures can get batches of bad parts. (Hidden variables like that are one of the reasons why the singular of data isn't anecdote.)

I also wonder if we'll ever get numbers from Backblaze on things like the actual temperature, decibels and power these drives lived through. More than just avoiding a particular model. It would be nice to know how hot, loud and nasty you can get before your commodity-class storage starts pooping out.