Annual Hard Drive Reliability Report: 8TB, HGST Disks Top Chart Racking Up 45 Years Without Failure (arstechnica.com)

Online backup solution provider Backblaze has released its much-renowned, annual hard drives reliability and failure report. From a report on ArsTechnica: The company uses self-built pods of 45 or 60 disks for its storage. Each pod is initially assembled with identical disks, but different pods use different sizes and models of disk, depending on age and availability. The standout finding: three 45-disk pods using 4TB Toshiba disks, and one 45-disk pod using 8TB HGST disks, went a full year without a single spindle failing. These are, respectively, more than 145 and 45 years of aggregate usage without a fault. The Toshiba result makes for a nice comparison against the drive's spec sheet. Toshiba rates that model as having a 1-million-hour mean time to failure (MTTF). Mean time to failure (or mean time between failures, MTBF -- the two measures are functionally identical for disks, with vendors using both) is an aggregate property: given a large number of disks, Toshiba says that you can expect to see one disk failure for every million hours of aggregated usage. Over 2016, those disks accumulated 1.2 million hours of usage without failing, healthily surpassing their specification. [...] For 2016 as a whole, Backblaze saw its lowest ever failure rate of 1.95 percent. Though a few models remain concerning -- 13.6 percent of one older model of Seagate 4TB disk failed in 2016 -- most are performing well. Seagate's 6TB and 8TB models, in contrast, outperform the average. Improvements to the storage pod design that reduce vibration are also likely to be at play.

Comments

Re:HGST nearly always on top

[VernonNemitz]

Here's a wild idea that might extend disk-drive lifespan even more. All the drive-spindles/axles in one of those pods should be aligned parallel with the Earth's rotation axis (details in the link).

Re:HGST nearly always on top

[drinkypoo]

I grew up in Santa Cruz, which meant I was very near to Seagate. One of the most popular local BBSes was run by a Seagate engineer. A lot of cheap used Seagate disks mysteriously found their way onto the local market, and you could generally get ST-506 disks for $1/MB, which was exciting and astounding at the time. Back then, Conner was pure crap, Maxtor was interesting and decent, WD or Quantum seemed to be the best, and even locally we called Seagate "Seizegate" and everyone learned to take their drives out of their PC and whack them just so in order to free them up from stiction... approximately weekly. Just one or two good temperature cycles without turning on the system was sometimes enough to make them freeze.

These disks weren't marked in any way as engineering samples, though I suppose that's not impossible. But it wasn't just me. It was a fairly universal experience.