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BackBlaze's Hard Drive Stats for Q2 2017 (backblaze.com)
BackBlaze is back with its new hard drive reliability report: Since our last report for Q1 2017, we have added 635 additional hard drives to bring us to the 83,151 drives we'll focus on. We'll begin our review by looking at the statistics for the period of April 1, 2017 through June 30, 2017 (Q2 2017). [...] When looking at the quarterly numbers, remember to look for those drives with at least 50,000 drive hours for the quarter. That works out to about 550 drives running the entire quarter. That's a good sample size. If the sample size is below that, the failure rates can be skewed based on a small change in the number of drive failures.
Editor's note: In short: hard drives from HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital, and Toshiba were far more reliable than those from Seagate across the models BackBlaze uses in its datacenters.
Editor's note: In short: hard drives from HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital, and Toshiba were far more reliable than those from Seagate across the models BackBlaze uses in its datacenters.
Editor's note: In short: hard drives from HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital, and Toshiba were far more reliable than those from Seagate
Which has been the case since BackBlaze started releasing it's reliability numbers, aside from a few instances where a specific model of Seagate performed unusually well.
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Tradition. This is the same company that shipped a warehouse full of known bad drives to market, as an accounting trick, back at the dawn of personal computers.
The same name anyhow.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They have a relatively high failure rate with the 8TB Seagate enterprise drives compared to the 8TB Seagate consumer drives because the enterprise drives are just in service. Over time the ones that did not fail the first few months will not start to fail till their expected lifespan of 3 years 24/7 running.
But in any case, the Hitachi drives have a much lower failure rate. I am probably going to buy a few of those HGST 10TB drives which now just dipped under $300 for my NAS.
There was a time when Seagate gave a much longer warranty than their competitors and the drives actually lasted longer.
Sadly, those days are long gone.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I stopped buying Seagate drives years ago. They still suck?
...that old R.E.M. song "That's me on the hard drive, losing my partition"
Some of remember the old IBM Deathstar drives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
IBM sold their hard drive business and it has become HGST now. Weird how that is now reliable brand.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
Perhaps you are thinking of Miniscribe, they shipped actual bricks in boxes prior to them going out of business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniScribe
Seagate. Back in 20 meg days. It was around the first time they went bankrupt.
They got caught carrying a warehouse full of test failures as an asset. When caught by the auditors they doubled down and shipped them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I stopped buying Seagate drives years ago. They still suck?
They did several years ago. Since then I replaced my Seagate drives with SSDs in the gaming PC and laptop, and Western Digital 1TB Red NAS drives in the file server. Although I did get a newer Seagate 3TB hard drive to serve as a backup drive for the file server. No problems with that drive yet.
People buy them.
They see "WOW SUPER CHEAP GOTTA BUY!" and buy 20 of the damn things and regret it when all 20 later die.
I've lost a 4th one just recently (literally 2 days ago) by it doing fucking nothing. It's a drive from 2005-6. This at least lasted a while longer, gotta give it that. Might be seizing up. Going to do the freezing thing at some point. Not now, not in the mood for it, it's got nothing of significance and I even considered bouncing it off a wall when it happened.
Still need to restart since I ended up unplugging the damn thing when it was hanging explorer. (external SATA adapter)
It has a ghost drive sitting around after restarting explorer preventing me from plugging another drive in for formatting since the tool tries to read said ghost drive forever. GEE THANKS WINDOWS.
I will be doing that immediately after this post.
My 3 other drives were 2003 laptop drive dead in 2005, 2 others from 2007 which died sooner than the older ones, about 2 years~.
Meanwhile I still have drives in the 90s that work and loads of other drives scattered around that timeframe up to now that still work fine.
Me, being a stupid teen at the time, was blown away by SUPER LOW PRICES like any typical retard during the time. (not to mention it was basically my first adventure in to buying my own hard drives )
Fuck Seagate. Friends don't let friends buy Seagate. Give them a slap if they consider it.
Most people I know have had issues with them too.
I had one friend have to deal with 7 of the things failing and him losing loads of stuff.
They simply do not work well at all. Their entire design is flawed.
I think their drives die hardest with high seek-time workloads. The constant head-banging puts metal heads to shame. Their heads are what seemingly fail the most in any cases I've read about, if it isn't the cheap-shit electronics.
Site seems down.
For a single drive, go with the most reliable model. For a RAID, however, be sure to mix different manufacturers, models, and batches to avoid correlated failures...
Because, if the failures are random, your mirror or even a large-count RAID5 will do fine for millennia, assuming you replace the failing ones in a reasonable time.
But if the drives are all the same, they may all — after spending the same time in the same enclosure under the same load — fail for the same reason at the same time. Having hot-spares or multiple redundancy will not help you...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Many times the drives in external enclosures are refurbished.
Because they don't. Backblaze takes consumer drives, plonks them in an environment they weren't designed for (servers) and runs them 24/7. Hardly surprising drives have an abnormal failure rate.
No legit vendor would do this because passing off referb parts as new in most western countries is completely illegal. External drives are different though, but that was not always the case.
In 2010 when you picked up an external drive it was a bog standard hard drive with a sata->usb converter board and a power supply.
When you get an external drive in 2017 you get a purpose built device designed to reduce BOM cost and provide optimal value for it's use case. The converter will be built in to the logic board. (Open it up. You'll find that on the tiny ones the usb 3.0 connector is phisically part of the main logic board.) And the entire drive firmware will be optimized for usb/external operation.
These drives will also use SMR to increase density and lower cost - SMR is fine for USB drives because USB introduces a lot of overhead that diminishes performance anyway. You're also not booting from the thing. Likely you're just tossing on lots of large files and unplugging it when not in use. On SMR drives sequential transfers are as fast or faster but random access is much slower.
Corporate apologist shill alert. No one falls for that that old lie any more. The difference between "consumer" and "enterprise" drives is a different label and a huge price gouge. Nothing more. Actually 24x7 operation is a lot easier on them than constant cycling on/off.
Yeah, I remember when Seagate had the most reliable drives and I used them for many years until their quality went way down. I'm not buying spinning disks any longer, though the last ones I bought were Samsung manufactured (funnily enough they sold their hard drive business to Seagate several years ago) and some of those are still seeing regular use in some older boxes or for local backup. By the time they fail I'll probably be able to replace them with an SSD that's just as large, but costs less than what I paid for those spinning drives when I bought them new.
BackBlaze already did this in an episode. They have proven that there is no statistical difference between Consumer or Enterprise grade. In fact, IIRC, the Enterprise Drives were slightly worse (but within statistical variance).
The reason why Enterprise are made, is for PHBs who see "Enterprise" and think ... "BETTER!!!!"
The sad thing is, that kind of crap marketing actually works.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Seagate is not reliable.
#DeleteFacebook
Tradition. This is the same company that shipped a warehouse full of known bad drives to market, as an accounting trick, back at the dawn of personal computers.
Wow, I worked for a company that boxed and "shipped" a pile of equipment to a host of resellers who hadn't ordered anything. The shipping terms where FOB-Origin so the resellers where responsible for picking up the equipment, which of course they didn't, because they didn't order it. Then, when the resellers got their invoices and complained that they didn't order all this stuff it got "returned" for a refund. Of course the "sell" date was in one quarter and the "returns" happened in the following one. It was just a way to realize a pile of sales and meet the quarter's numbers. The FTC got wind of this and the CFO got spanked and the company got fined, but it took a few years.
I didn't think it was a common practice....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It's sad that Windows and Linux users have to go to such troubles.
Me? I only buy Macs. Because Apple takes the 1% of the best drives made in each manufacturing lot and puts them in their Macs. That's why Macs are so expensive.
I mean, this has to be the reason, right? Surely they're not just buying the same parts as Dell and others and just selling overpriced computers and pocketing the profits.
#DeleteFacebook
Here is an old article from 2014 but I suspect it still holds: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk_reliability/
I'm not sure how they calculated the failure rates. For one model, they had 5/400 fail, for another 13/157. These are both pretty high (though with such small number, could be statistical flukes), but neither is 30%.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Google did a similar study into their own drive population about 10 years ago... from memory: "enterprise" drives fared no better than "consumer" ones..
I think this was the document: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf
Maybe creimer has a hard drive in his head too?
As a rule of thumb, I don't bother to memorize stuff. Specialized knowledge should always be documented. If not documented, I write the documentation and stick it into a knowledge base.
Well, typically the enterprise ones have a different controller and a longer warranty, but otherwise spot on.
By voodoo. No, really, the guy generating the numbers has no clue about math, much less statistics. Your question got me curious, so I started looking at their numbers and almost none of them work out. So I dug around and found their PDF "How Backblaze computes failure rates" and ... where to start.
They give an example involving 15 drives whereby two failures in 100 days gives a daily failure rate of 2%. (Two percent of what?) Then they conclude *from two failures in 100 days* that two drives will fail each day and 730 drives will fail in a year. If you're scratching your head at this point, you aren't the only one.
But to directly answer your question:
> To get the daily failure rate of drives in the Backblaze data center, you can take the
> number of failures counted in a given group of daily stats files, and divide by the
> number of rows in the same group of daily stats files.
To give a concrete example, the ST4000DM001 had 5998 "drive days" with five failures. 5/5998*365 = 0.304268 -- or, in Backblaze math, 30.43%
Their "failure rates" are nonsensical, but the data is interesting.
Hard disks are so old fashioned, why don't they use the Cloud ?
Fujitsu sold a brand of external storage I've long since binned but the drives we returned by a company in Belgium iirc. they all failed very quickly and on inspection had all number of problems including burns in ribbon cables. sata 3.5 drive with us adapter in the box era. Their con cost me 900 in dead hard safe and 6 months of work
Buy on sales. Bought several from newegg.ca when they go on for less than an Ironwolf.
Three? I've seen a poster detailing at least 10 types of shit.
BackBlaze is about to put in a behemothic order as it gets ready to take on all the CrashPlan customers.
'Stuffing the channel' is common enough to have a cute name. In very limited cases, it's even legal. But consult a shyster.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Seagate stats don't make any sense: ST4000DM001 - 400 - 5 - makes it 1.25% failure rate - I see 30.43% in the table. Likewise with ST4000DX000.
Could anyone explain how the f they calculated Seagate data?
I'd argue that their making so much profit they have to use something other than pockets ... maybe front end loaders.
No legit vendor would do this because passing off referb parts as new in most western countries is completely illegal.
Only if they're sold as "new." It's generally legal to resell them so long as you indicate that they're refurbished products.
It makes sense. They extrapolate an annual failure rate, since failure rates over time need some kind of time period to be useful. Using your example, if 5 drives fail over 5998 total days of drive time, that means any given drive has a 30% chance to fail in a given one-year period. As an example, if there were 50 drives in that sample, that would mean they ran those 50 drives for 120 days, and in that time 10% of them died, which is terrible reliability.
They give an example involving 15 drives whereby two failures in 100 days gives a daily failure rate of 2%. (Two percent of what?)
Good question. If two failures in 15 drives in 100 days = 2%, what would be the failure rate if two drives out of, say, 150 drives failed in 100 days? What if three drives failed in 101 days?