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:Not SSD Drives

[msauve]

"There are so few 8GB HGST drives, and they're so new, that the current data about them is statistically insignificant/unreliable"

The numbers in the summary come from different places, because the first chart in the linked article, for the April-June quarter says:

Seagate 8TB, 2720 drives, 35840 drive days, 3 failures (13 days average per drive, 3% annual failure rate)
HGST 8TM, 45 drives, 3825 drive days, 0 failures (85 days average per drive, 0% annual failure rate)

The second chart, from April 2013 through the end of June, doesn't show drive numbers, just days, failures, and rates. The numbers in the summary seem to be pulled from both.

Assuming that the 8TB drives stay in use until they die, here's where the stats seem to come from (drive days/# of drives). Drive days pulled from the "all time" chart, # of drives from the latest quarter chart):

22858/45= 507 days average use HGST HUH728080ALE600
44000/2700= 16 days average use Seagate ST8000DM002

Now, anyone experienced with Seagate wouldn't expect the 3.3% annualized failure rate to be that low in another year and a half. The HGST rate _is_ after almost a year and a half.

Contrasting anecdote

[billcopc]

I'm an independent white-box NAS guy, and with the exception of the truly awful 1.5TB Seagate drives from 2008-2009 or so, I have not had any significant problems with them. I've got a few thousand 3 to 8 TB drives deployed with my clients, most of them cheap consumer drives (not even the "NAS" editions), and the annual failure rate is roughly 2% across all brands. This has been consistent for many years and I factor these stats into my costs and warranty projections. I have

The thing that bothers me about Backblaze, and the reason why I have a very hard time taking their results seriously, is the way they design their pods. They take a custom fabbed chassis, then fill it with the most ghetto components known to man: SATA port multipliers, ultra-low-end HBAs, dual "gamer" power supplies, very substandard cooling, and until recently they used super sketchy desktop boards. It's only last year that they finally changed the board for a Supermicro, primarily to get 10GbE very cheaply. For that same money, you can buy a ready-made 60-bay Supermicro chassis with redundant power and SAS - and a warranty. Hell, I bet SM would deliver directly to Backblaze's doorstep *and* give them a friendly discount.

Anyway... epic digression aside, when people ask me which brand is better, I tell them to buy whichever has the best warranty. A hard drive *will* die, the question is when, so the only logical course of action is to plan around its inevitable demise by keeping backups and redundancies, and learning the ins and outs of the RMA process.