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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."
This is in THEIR environment, not a home environment. (Haven't read summary yet.)
...they use helium in the drives, so all your music sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks.
I think it's more about HGST drives being highly reliable
Reliability is not so great an issue with raid systems being what they are today. What the bean counters fail to consider is the cost in man power required to replace seagate drives on a constant basis. Not just in the racks but process RMA's or the proper destruction and disposal of drives which may contain sensitive data.
I wonder how those numbers would look if other vendors were offered an equal analysis period. I know WD was mentioned but it didn't appear they got equal share.
Also: First. :)
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
If your 8 TB hard drive is highly reliable, can you rely on your network connection and operating system to spy on everything you do?
Which city is Ed Snowden in presently?
Totally not trying to be pedantic, but the Seagate model they reference should actually be the "ST8000DM002"
These are all platter drives, but you can only discover that in the comments at TFA.
There are so few 8GB HGST drives, and they're so new, that the current data about them is statistically insignificant/unreliable, as is any model with less than 500 units and 200k drive days.
Just buy a price point and run in your production gear? Never take a peak at the firmware, or drive performance over time? Errors handled correctly? Wow dude. That takes guts.
I guess if you're cloud, you don't give a crap about corruption, but if you're looking at over 5% AFR's, you might want to take a closer look. You've probably got a firmware problem, and they probably have a fix for it. It may be something specific to your work load. I'm sure you buy enough drives from them so you can at least get your distributor to set something up. Seagate and HGST have some really good engineers that would probably want to know about the fallout before a year has passed. That RMA thing can get swallowed in the numbers.
"...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...
It seems the ST8000DM002 is a desktop drive. I've had 3 of the Archive variants (ST8000AS002), and they all failed within a week of use. The third time I got a refund.
I presume there's some detail I'm missing here since we did not have 8 TB hard drives 120 years ago.
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
Who measures uptime in drive days? That is like saying man hours or multiplying uptime by the number of disks in an array. Where does it end?
Maybe I'm old but damnit I want min / max / avg - in DAYS, per drive. Can we please stop changing units on everything?
Unless we're talking years of uptime, these numbers don't come close to my desktop hard drives let alone something MADE FOR A DATA CENTER.
Anyone who uses a Helium filled Hard drive won't want to be reminded what happens when the Helium leaks out ...
are 7000 0Sers for a moment and
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.
says 8TB Drive manufacturer
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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.
> The HGST HDS5C8080ALE600 worked for 22,858 days and only saw two failures
The Maths on this summary are worded really strangely. I am guessing they mean N drives for X days = 22,858 days, but it sounds like their 8TB drives were powered on 62 years ago and ran great except for two that died from the Germans bombing their data center in WW II. Oh wait, that was 72 years ago, so it must have been the 4 TB drives that died. My mistake. Really though, 22,858 days needs to be phrased like "man-hours", "man-years", etc. How about 22,858 unit-days?
I had a 1st Gen Seagate 80GB SATA fail last month after 11 years and change, of 24/7 daily operation and very few power-off cycles.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
are directly attributable to the controller boards. I have a 3TB from one of their USB drives that failed on me (It would just randomly start writing garbage to the drive, low level format would fix it, but reading back after would return garbage.) Another is a 500GB still in service that will start throwing read errors when the temp sensor reads around 45-50C (common during the summer here if the cooling is impeded the drive will heat up and begin malfunctioning, requiring both a cool off period and a full power-cycle to come back up properly. Oftentimes it results in data corruption across much of the directory tree resulting in most of the file system ending up in the lost+found folder, and a reinstall being needed to fix the system.
That particular system has a mix of third party drives in it, none of which see failures except for the seagates. (A diff seagate drive with ext2 filesystems does not see similiar corruption, although it is also accessed less frequently.)
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.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I end up reading the EXACT same comments and arguments.
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..
If ever you thought that nerds were more scientifically minded than others, just ask them about their hard-drive preferences and watch them wax anecdotal.
By far the most used drive in the above report is the 4GB Seagate ST4000DM000: ~34,000 drives with a 2.7% failure rate. Two Toshiba's and one WDC show failure rates of nearly 9%. HGST is the only manufacturer with consistently sub-5% failure rates.
The enterprise drives always seem heavier to me.
the most unreliable.
That is why you buy in the sweet spot for best value and let someone else prove new technologies and HD densities for you..
My local recycler has two machines that shred drives like a paper shredder. It doesn't matter what type of drive. You pour drives in the top and flakes of metal fall out the bottom within 3 seconds. Not even SSD chips survive these machines. Encryption, overwriting, drilling, are all pointless wastes of time. Shred em and forget about it.
When I perform a new system roll out and old systems are being recycled, I pop out the drives and the recycler shreds them en mass right in front of me. 50 drives takes ~5 minutes.
The machines are ridiculously simple so when the recycler told me that they cost $15,000 to $20,000 each I didn't believe him. But I later verified it to be true. Even the cheap little portable "wood splitter" type device that presses and splits two or three drives at a time is over $4,000
and the Japanese brands are highest quality, it's just like their previous reports. HGST, while being owned by an American company, is still doing all their research and development in Japan, by Japanese engineers, and this is likely the key difference that makes the HGST drives come out so far above the American drives.
Why would anybody buy a spinning hard drive today so slow and solid-state drives are so cheap . I have a terabyte SSD drive in the new MacBook has read and write speeds close to a gigabyte a sec I have an eight-year-old MacBook, that before I swapped the hard drives for ssd had a 22 MB a second read write speed. Samsung has dominated the market micron might have a chance but anybody making spinning hard drive is wasting time.it's time the world implements a lifecycle tax. Meaning if the product last hundred years there's no tax if it lasts one day its thousand percent we don't need anymore happy meal toys
These are the same guys that claim HGST hard drives are reliable. Yeah, no thanks!
Read what I have written it is very simple. Semiconductors behave differently when hot and that sometimes leads to failure. There is a lot of heat input from the mechanical side of the drives. If it can't be transferred away you get hot electronics no matter what you do on the electronic side.
Does that make sense yet?