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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."
UPDATE 8/2/16: Corrected Seagate Model "DT8000DM002" to "ST8000DM002."
"...the company saw an annualized failure rate of 19.81 percent with the Seagate ST4000DX000 4TB drive"
A failure rate of almost 20% in a data center? Geez, that's pathetic.
A temperature-controlled environment, clean power, low shock and vibration, and 1 out of 5 still fails? Remind me never to buy Seagate. Oh, wait, I already vowed never to buy another Seagate- about 10 years ago after experiencing their unequaled propensity to die fast and hard.
Maybe other people have had better luck with Seagate than I have, but for me they've always been disappointing.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If you've got 3,000 drives at home to come up with directly home applicable numbers, then please share them.
This is mostly useful to compare models vs models as the environment is kept the same.
It's completely legitimate to say model X is more reliable than model Y, it's not valid to say model X has a Z% failure rate in a home environment however.
Come back in 3 or 5 years and tell me out of all the 8TB sold in 2016/2017 just how many are still functional and THEN what the failure rate is/was.
My "prediction" is it will most likely be that there is an 70% failure rate with Seagate being the top offender.
By then the data is worthless to anybody except the manufacturer. We necessarily have to accept a deficit of statistical quality to make forward predictions that are actually worth something, like knowing if I'm building a SAN, what drives I should buy.
In 5 years, I'm not going to be buying 8TB drives, so knowing what the failure rate for some 8TB drive was is inconsequential. Either HDDs continue to improve and I buy 32TB or larger HDDs, or they don't, and I'll be filling my SAN with 8TB or larger SSDs, Xpoint memory, memristor, who knows.
I'm looking at this data and it's informing me that I ought to be buying HGST drives, and that I made a mistake installing 3TB Seagate drives (though the drives tested are not the capacity or exact model ones I have), and that as they begin to fail, I would be better to replace them with 4TB HGST.
I don't really care what happens to my drives 5 years out, they'll probably be replaced with higher capacity stock whether they start to fail or not. If my capacity needs to grow, I can buy new JBOD cards, a bigger mainboard to accomodate the extra channels, more JBOD trays, more racks, upgrade the AC, and pay a higher power bill -or- I add an extra slice to a mirror with a 2x density drive, resilver, replace one of the old drives with a 2x density drive, resilver, and continue until all the drives in the mirror have been 2x'd, rinse and repeat gradually throughout the array until sufficient capacity is reached. The cost works out lower. Sure the bigger drives are more expensive than the cheap drives and I only get the incremental value, but the balance of costs is such, that it's still cheaper than endlessly growing JBODs.
The cost is lower still, considering that the drives are bought according to schedule, and when failures occur, the replacements are the larger capacity according to our schedule, and drives removed from mirrors due to capacity upgrades are put in the hotspare pool, ready to repair older, unupgraded mirrors.
All 2TB drives are outgoing at the end of this month, 6TB drives are incoming for replacements and capacity growth.
If it's working for them in their packed in boxes with crap airflow and really poor heat transfer then it will work even better in conventional file servers with hot swap drives at the front and a heap of airflow.
Take it with a grain of salt when Backblaze say a drive is crap since it may only be crap in their very hostile environment, but if they didn't break it then it's very likely to work well anywhere.
OTOH, given SSDs and the inability to guarantee the erasure of all data on the drive,
Wow, SSD even survives incinerators? Where I used to work, the policy for drives was to open them up and strip them for their magnets, then have magnet fun. The platters made good frisbees, but the problem is that they go through car windows, and the dents in cars are deep, so frisbee with care.
Learn to love Alaska
What I've learned from reading the comments here is that people are just as clueless when it comes to storage reliability as they ever were, and are just as capable of throwing the baby out with the bathwater as at any other time.
Dear Slashdot: Never change.
Kid-proof tablet..