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

HGST nearly always on top

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time Backblaze publishes a report the HGST drives always come out on top.

It's a little more expensive to fill your NAS with them but in my experience it's been worth it.

Re:HGST nearly always on top

[BenJeremy]

Seagate blows. I've got a lot of hard drives - Toshibas, Hitachis, WDs, Seagates.... I have exactly three Seagates out of 12 that are currently working.

On the other hand, I've bought up some "refurb" Hitachis (server pulls with 20k hours) and they just work.

Seagate hasn't made a quality drive since they bought up Maxtor and, apparently, dumped all of their factories, QA people and engineers in favor of Maxtor's. It's the only explanation I can think of for the nosedive in quality.

It's rather ironic that the former "Deathstar" line is more reliable than Seagate these days

45 years

[trb]

Aggregate years are not years.
"Nine women can't make a baby in one month."

Re:Real article

[supercell]

They don't want you to leave their web site, it's that simple.

Model numbers much more important than brand name

[raymorris]

Looking at data from both Backblaze and Google, what's apparent to me is that all brands have some good models and some bad. Google made sure to point that out in their report. Something like "the most reliable model and the least reliable model are the same brand. While reliability is somewhat consistent within samples of the same model, there is little to no correlation between any brand name and reliability".

In other words, these studies show that HGST Model #12345678 is a good drive. They don't show that HGST (or any other company) consistently makes good drives.

Even Backblaze warns these numbers mean little

[Leslie43]

Even Backblaze warns these numbers shouldn't really be used by the average consumer to justify their drive purchases, and for very good reasons.

The numbers lie.
They lie because you don't use drives in the manner that they do, Backblaze starts a pod, it fills with data and then primarily sits IDLE from that point on. In other words, they fire it up, does a ton of writes then does nothing, whereas your drives write, read erase, spin up, spin down constantly. Your drives sit in a box that may be in a warm closet, lack air flow, or sit by your feet getting bumped all of the time.