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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."
...they use helium in the drives, so all your music sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks.
OTOH, given SSDs and the inability to guarantee the erasure of all data on the drive, unencrypted data should never hit the drives at all, and the key should of course also never be stored on the same media (unencrypted).
That said, only my newer systems use encrypted volumes. My old drives I take apart and shatter/melt the platters.
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"...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...
You know what? You're absolutely right and I do stand corrected - I recall this about the 3 TB - probably from Backblaze's data - and I want to say that I think they were first hitting the market after the Thailand disaster? It seems like the 4 TB models are pretty resilient. Anecdotally, I have 8 handling my home library and backups, and have had no failures since I started buying them in March 2013..
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More like Seagate 8TB not being utter trash (like so many other Seagate drives).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Reliability is not so great an issue with raid systems being what they are today.
At the scale Backblaze is talking about, I would say it's an issue. Somebody has to keep all those drives in stock and walk back to a cage to replace them. It's not data loss we're worried about here, it's costs.
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I presume there's some detail I'm missing here since we did not have 8 TB hard drives 120 years ago.
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"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.
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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.
They're both terrible numbers, though perhaps not terrible by Seagate standards. The best of the HGST 4 TB drives had an annualized failure rate of only 0.4%. If these numbers are correct, then these drives are about an order of magnitude less reliable than previous generations of hardware....
Of course, the confidence intervals on these numbers are huge. On the low end, the HGST 8 TB drive could be approximately as reliable as the 4 TB HGST drives (.4%). On the high end, it could be as bad as a 12% annualized failure rate, which would put it into the "complete junk" category. In other words, 45 drives just aren't enough data points to be much more reliable than the anecdotal evidence from folks posting on Slashdot.
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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.
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.
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yes it would be unit-days, as in nX=22858 so each drive in the array (n) had an uptime of X=22858/n. We know what n is. It's 45. Therefore, X=22858/45=~508 days. The stated MTBF of the HGST Enterprise-class drives is 2.5 million hours. That would put the expected array failure rate at 2,314 days (2.5mill. divided by array size).
So don't be impressed, this is actually a failure report.
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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.
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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.
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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.
And they can hurt too. Not that I'd have any personal experience with that....
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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..