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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.
Arstechnica just borderline copy&pasting from the source. See the actual article at: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
Shame on Arstechnica for not even bothering to link their source material.
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"Nine women can't make a baby in one month."
Well... some people will tell you that babies are created at the time of conception...
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In my job we sell tens of millions of each product. We warrant for X years (E.G. 8-10 would be typical for something with a natural replacement cycle of 4-5 years), so we then design the things such that the curve is at a low point at time X. Component aging is heavily modeled and measured so we don't mess up. It would indeed get very expensive if there were lots of early failures. You find bad batches through testing.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The bathtub curve is certainly real, but most drives aren't kept in service long enough to see the far wall - Google's study only goes to 5 years, for example. As failure rates start climbing you tend to replace the lot of them, rather than keep them in service until you reach 50% failure/year. (Note that the PDF you linked does show high infant mortality for drives in heavy use.)
I used to work with very old HDDs, though, and even with a busy used market, the supply of old drives would fall off a cliff at a certain point. When everyone is seeing 50% failure/year, it doesn't take long until spares just can't be found.
(If you're curious why anyone would put up with that sort of thing - the software that works only works on a machine old enough that only very old drives can attach to it. And since demand at the time was maybe 1% of the peak, you'd be using old drives until about 90% ever made had failed.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The thing about anecdotes like this is that the sampleset is always very small, so it's not a very meaningful datapoint.
I have several 8-year-old 250 gig Seagate 7200.10 drives that refuse to die. I took them out of service a few weeks ago.
At work, I've seen a lot of Seagates die in NVRs. But then, the NVRs were all mostly populated with 2TB Seagates from day 1 -- so of course I'm going to see a lot of them die. I also see plenty of 2TB WD drives bite the dust. I've never seen an HGST drive die in an NVR, but then none of them have HGST drives installed....
Statistically, from my perspective, it's about a wash. But that doesn't really mean anything, because again my own sampleset is very limited in scope compared to Backblaze or Google.
Meanwhile, IBM at one point was making some absolutely stellar hard drives. Their 9ES SCSI drives were the bee's knees at the time, and were resoundingly reliable. It's hard to characterize a brand of hard drive -- some models are good, and some are bad, from just about any manufacturer.
(Except for Quantum. Quantum was never good. And Miniscribe, because fuck those crooks.)
Kid-proof tablet..