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.

Real article

[TypoNAM]

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.

Re:Real article

[supercell]

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

45 years

[trb]

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

Re:45 years

[The-Ixian]

"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...

Re:In other news - in 2062 they will have time tra

[arth1]

I find it hard to believe. It isn't measuring 45 years worth of things like metal fatigue, material decay or degeneration, wear and tear etc.

For spinning disks, factors that do not materialize in the first few years and thus can't be determined from an aggregated short time test include (but are not limited to)
- demagnetization of fixed magnets (leads to write failures)
- magnetization of paramagnetic materials (leads to bit rot)
- wear on ball bearings (leads to all kinds of fatal crashes)
- accretion of and contamination of lubrication (leads to sticktion)

Based on my own experience as a long term sysadmin, the quality and longevity of drives go up and down. Late 1990s drives were bad, early 2000s were good, late 2000s were bad, early 2010s were good, and now it's pretty bad again. It's not just vendor specific, because vendors seem to adjust to each other to arrive at common price/quality point. Sure, there are exceptions, like the Deathstars, but overall, I think the drives tend to be similar in longevity not so much based on brand, but what generation they are.

Re:In other news - in 2062 they will have time tra

[lgw]

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.)