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

Yeah, but...

[by (1706743)]

...they use helium in the drives, so all your music sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks.

High failure rate

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"...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.

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.

Re:Correct Seagate 8 TB Model

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found one! The mythical Slashdot editor who edits. All hail the editing editor!

Re:comment

[cheater512]

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.

22,858 and 44,000 days?!?

[Linsaran]

I presume there's some detail I'm missing here since we did not have 8 TB hard drives 120 years ago.

If it's working for them

[dbIII]

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.

Re:Reliability

[AK Marc]

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.

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.