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BackBlaze's Hard Drive Stats for Q2 2017 (backblaze.com)

Posted by msmash on from the reality-check dept.

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.

18 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. HGST and Toshiba have been at the top for years by CrashNBrn · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:HGST and Toshiba have been at the top for years by Thelasko · · Score: 2

      HGST has come a long way since the Deathstar days.

      --
      One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
    2. Re:HGST and Toshiba have been at the top for years by fred6666 · · Score: 2

      and yet, they continue buying far more Seagate than anything else.
      The reason is that they are cheaper, and it's not worth it to pay a premium for other brands.

      On amazon.ca, 4TB Seagate is $140, Western Digital is $157.

      For external (don't understand why, but it's cheaper) 8TB, Seagate is $235 and Western is $280

    3. Re:HGST and Toshiba have been at the top for years by Thelasko · · Score: 2

      From your own link HGST never manufactured a "Deathstar". That was entirely IBM's doing.

      "The line was continued by Hitachi when in 2003 it bought IBM's hard disk drive division and renamed it Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. In 2012 Hitachi sold the division to Western Digital who rebranded it as HGST."

      Hitachi didn't buy just the IP, they bought the division. That typically means all of the IP, manufacturing facilities, engineering, and business operations related to a product line. It's likely that there are a few people that worked on the "deathstar" that still work for HGST today.

      --
      One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
    4. Re:HGST and Toshiba have been at the top for years by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 2

      Editor's note: In short: hard drives from HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital, and Toshiba were far more reliable than those from Seagate

      I'm not sure that you can reach that conclusion from their data for the latest generation. The STD4000s were definitely hot garbage and the HGST 4TB were fantastic. But none of those drives are still on the market.

      The Seagate STD8000s they are running have a combined 1.2M drive days with 38 failiures. That's 1 average failure every 32k days. They also have around 1.75 failures per thousand.

      The WDC60 drives only have 40k days on them so they're still in the ballpark of similar performance. With 443 drives total again they are right around the 0/1 sample size. With such a small sample size the WDC is right on the edge of the margin of error on the sampling being larger than the failure rate of the Seagates.

      The new HGST 8TB generation only has 45 drives to sample from so absolutely nothing can be learned from it.

      I would say excluding the complete duds that were the ST4000s the Seagates are in their modern offerings equal to the WDCs.

      Honestly this last generation is looking so good for failure rates that I would just pick on capacity/price which Seagate is offering the best value for. Everything is a RAID these days and I don't have thousands of drives so my chances of replacing a drive is minimal and even then my only "risk" is the time/performance hit to rebuild the new drive.

  2. Re:Bathtub model by BenJeremy · · Score: 4, Informative

    I have a stack of dead 2TB+ Seagate drives sitting around here.

    Never again. They merged with Maxtor and the worst of both companies emerged out of the ooze.

  3. Seagate drives will have you singing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...that old R.E.M. song "That's me on the hard drive, losing my partition"

    1. Re:Seagate drives will have you singing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      I thought that I heard you crashing
      I thought that I heard a ding
      I think I thought I heard you dying

    2. Re:Seagate drives will have you singing... by arth1 · · Score: 2

      ...that old R.E.M. song "That's me on the hard drive, losing my partition"

      Back in the early 90s we joked "That's me on the Conner". I guess these days, few people know or remember Conner hard drives and their dubious reliability, so the update make sense! :)

  4. Re:hard drives from HGST ... far more reliable by HornWumpus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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'
  5. Be sure, your RAID has a mixture by mi · · Score: 2

    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.
    1. Re:Be sure, your RAID has a mixture by bobbied · · Score: 2

      Hot spare drives DO help, as long as you don't leave them spinning when they are in standby. It allows you to restore redundancy on a detectable failure and return your system to a "dual failure required for data loss" condition.

      Your point about not using drives from the same manufacturing run in a RAID array is somewhat valid, in that it can increase the possibility of having multiple drives fail at similar times, but if you *monitor* your drives, many failures are evident before they become catastrophic and you can usually be ready for recovery.

      However, the real issue with drive failures, in a RAID or alone, is having a backup strategy to recover from data loss events, which in my experience is *rarely* due to a drive failure, and usually due to user errors and environmental issues like power or cooling failures.

      My advice is to buy the best drives you can afford, back up offline and verify all your data regularly, closely monitor your hardware (power, cooling, drive errors) and take corrective action sooner rather than later. Don't run RAID for redundancy, only for performance if you can help it, and provision spare drives when using redundancy RAID arrays. Finally, BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP! ALWAYS BACKUP to offline storage...

      Spend your time wisely, backup often, don't argue about RAID, disk drive reliability and hot spares or not. Disk drives WILL fail, all of them, you WILL lose the data on them. Make sure you can deal with that problem first..

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    2. Re:Be sure, your RAID has a mixture by mi · · Score: 2

      Hot spare drives DO help, as long as you don't leave them spinning when they are in standby. It allows you to restore redundancy on a detectable failure and return your system to a "dual failure required for data loss" condition.

      Having a hot spare will cut your drive-replacement time by no more than a few hours. That's usually no more than a fraction of the actual rebuild time and, as my graph shows, that does not perceptibly affect the RAID's total MTTF. Moreover, if you monitor the drives — as you rightly suggest everybody should — then you can schedule the replacement of an about-to-fail one ahead of time, eliminating the difference between a hot and a cold spare entirely.

      You'd be better off using the slot occupied by the hot spare to increase the RAID's total capacity. Do have a cold spare — on the shelf — for the operator to slide in when needed, but a hot spare is simply not warranted.

      No disagreement on the importance of monitoring and backup-up...

      --
      In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
  6. Re:hard drives from HGST ... far more reliable by fnj · · Score: 2

    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.

  7. Re:hard drives from HGST ... far more reliable by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 2

    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.
  8. Re:hard drives from HGST ... far more reliable by bobbied · · Score: 2

    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
  9. Apple for the win by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  10. Re:Bathtub model by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

    You and I have very different definitions of optimal. 2TB SSDs cost a little under double what 10TB hard disks cost. For a consumer NAS, the performance difference vs having a reasonable amount of RAM / L2ARC is negligible over the network (the disks are not the bottleneck), but the cost for the same capacity is at least 10 times (probably more, as you need a lot more SSDs and so need more space, more controllers, and so on).

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News