Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2017 (backblaze.com)

BackBlaze is back with its hard drive reliability report. From the blog post: Beginning in April 2013, Backblaze has recorded and saved daily hard drive statistics from the drives in our data centers. Each entry consists of the date, manufacturer, model, serial number, status (operational or failed), and all of the SMART attributes reported by that drive. As of the end of 2017, there are about 88 million entries totaling 23 GB of data. At the end of 2017 we had 93,240 spinning hard drives. Of that number, there were 1,935 boot drives and 91,305 data drives. This post looks at the hard drive statistics of the data drives we monitor. We'll review the stats for Q4 2017, all of 2017, and the lifetime statistics for all of the drives Backblaze has used in our cloud storage data centers since we started keeping track.

Comments

Bottom line

[ArchieBunker]

Seagate is garbage and cheap while HGST is better and more expensive. WD falls in the middle. Price be GB has not fallen in a long time either. I'm out of space and always wonder about saving $90 by shucking a WD EasyStore or paying for HGST.

Re:Bottom line

[slaker]

It looks to me like everyone has cleaned up their act. I'm willing to accept a 1% - 2% annualized failure rate for (mostly) consumer drives. It wasn't all that long ago that I thought anything under 5% was doing pretty well. I'm interested to see how the trends for the 8TB+ units play out, but it doesn't look like there are any obvious crap products any longer.

Re:Bottom line

[lgw]

Yeah, Seagate certainly did not cover themselves with glory here. I'm disappointed by how far WD has fallen, but the writing was on the wall with the last couple years' reports. Glad I read those and moved to HGST.

Re:Bottom line

[alvinrod]

I'm curious how Seagate screwed things up so badly. They bought Samsung's HDD division some years ago and I found that Samsung produced some incredibly reliable drives (I've actually still got a few running in older machines that have been going for over a decade at this point) for that time period.

I also remember a time when Seagate was thought of as one of the more reliable brands, at least compared to some other ones (Maxtor) that had burned a lot of people I knew. I think Seagate also bought them at any earlier point though, so perhaps that's when the troubles started.

Re:Bottom line

[omfglearntoplay]

HGST is a subsidiary of Western Digital.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So like... what is going on here with WD if their HGST line is so much better than their regular line? Also, I hope people are being careful of the crazy rates for Q4, because they don't mean what they appear to mean at a surface level. Quoting the article:

"Quarterly failure rates can be volatile, especially for models that have a small number of drives and/or a small number of drive days. For example, the Seagate 4 TB drive, model ST4000DM005, has a annualized failure rate of 29.08%, but that is based on only 1,255 drive days and 1 (one) drive failure."

Re:Bottom line

[slaker]

A WD Employee I know told me that their manufacturing and development processes for WD and HGST have retained their distinct identities, at least as of 2016. Maybe it's too expensive for WD to switch to the HGST ways of doing things?

Re:Bottom line

[tlhIngan]

I'm curious how Seagate screwed things up so badly. They bought Samsung's HDD division some years ago and I found that Samsung produced some incredibly reliable drives (I've actually still got a few running in older machines that have been going for over a decade at this point) for that time period.

I also remember a time when Seagate was thought of as one of the more reliable brands, at least compared to some other ones (Maxtor) that had burned a lot of people I knew. I think Seagate also bought them at any earlier point though, so perhaps that's when the troubles started.

Easy - Seagate is cheap. Stupidly cheap. And because they're built to a price, they will use inferior parts to achieve that low bottom line.

And when you think about it, for commodity items, that's really all the consumer looks for. Price price price price. If you can be $20 cheaper than the next guy, you will get the sale. Everyone knows it, and they still buy anyways because face it, everyone is cheap.

And companies like Backblaze factor it into account - it's still cheaper to have Seagate drives powering their systems (which the data is redundant anyways0 and replacing them than spending more money on better drives and replacing them less.

For personal use it's clear HGST is the way to go. Sure you pay a few extra bucks, but I don't have a massive data farm with redundant data spread out all over the place.I can't afford multiple drive failures.

Don't you have backups? You know, in case one of the dozens of other ways to lose data other than hard drive failure happen? (Crypto malware, filesystem corruption, bad power, software bugs, etc).

A good backup system mitigates a lot of it, and given the pricing for HGST drives (they were nearly double the price of a Seagate, for not much more reliability) in the end it was hard to justify except in very limited circumstances. For me, that was the main disk of my network backup server (Windows Home Server) - it's a critical disk and I spent extra for it. I can easily rebuild it if necessary (I've done it before) so it's not super critical, but while I do that it's offline. So that drive is super critical and I use an HGST drive for it for uninterrupted service. The other disks are not as critical (they hold the data redundantly) so cheaper drives are used there.

That being said, I wonder how much these stats are caused by poor shipping and handling of drives? I've pretty much stopped buying hard drives online except from Amazon because Amazon uses proper shipping containers. Far too often I've ran across "high tech stores" (computer component companies, especially) who really ship drives in questionable ways - the worst was one who stuck a drive in a padded mailing envelope and sent it like that. No surprise it failed quickly. But others stack drives together and bubble wrap the whole thing, which pretty much ensures most are dead when it hits your doorstep. Sometimes I get lucky and they cut up one of the drive shipping containers and put drives in those, then wrap it up. Better than nothing, but still not great. Even in store I've had employees carry drives and thump them all on the counter in a heap. Scary.

Only Amazon put them in boxes with endcaps so the drive floats inside - you know, like how every drive manufacturer says you have to ship the drives for RMA. Either that or you buy retail package drives where they're protected because they know how clueless employees can be.

One wonders how much damage is caused by poor packaging of hard drives which leads to a shortened service life.

Re:Bottom line

[AmiMoJo]

This is indeed true. HGST R&D is still done in Japan, and their target markets that will pay slightly more for increased reliability and durability (servers, appliances like DVRs etc.)

WD is more consumer focused.

Re:Bottom line

[mobby_6kl]

I think you might be overstating a bit just how cheap Seagate drives are. I recently bought a HGST NAS drive and it was like 5% more expensive than a similarly-specced Seagate. This seems to roughly hold true when looking and comparable lines, though obviously the shingle archive drivers would be much cheaper than the high performance NAS stuff.

Re:Bottom line

[larryjoe]

"Quarterly failure rates can be volatile, especially for models that have a small number of drives and/or a small number of drive days. For example, the Seagate 4 TB drive, model ST4000DM005, has a annualized failure rate of 29.08%, but that is based on only 1,255 drive days and 1 (one) drive failure."

Yes, the naive will assume that the stated failure rates are gospel. However, the real truth is that the Backblaze reported numbers are sampled estimates that are a combination of the intrinsic reliability of the drive and the operating environment and workloads. It is not clear how well their failure rate estimates translate to other environments. Cooling systems, vibration mitigation, duty cycles, etc. are significant.

One thing that Backblaze could do to impart some robustness to their numbers is to provide statistical confidence intervals along with the single estimators.

Re:Bottom line

[whoever57]

One thing that Backblaze could do to impart some robustness to their numbers is to provide statistical confidence intervals along with the single estimators.

Something like this chart, you mean:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog...

Re: Bottom line

[Brockmire]

I admit I buy HGST on sale, but where the fuck do you live where HGST is even 50% more expensive? Are you comparing HGST NAS models to Seagate desktop models? That's the only way to explain almost double pricing. Even then, I think a 4TB desktop went for $99 and I bought several 4TB HGST NAS for 124.99 each over Black Friday. Just buy your spares on sale. Then you can hold out for 3-5 year warranty NAS drives.

Re:Bottom line

[larryjoe]

One thing that Backblaze could do to impart some robustness to their numbers is to provide statistical confidence intervals along with the single estimators.

Something like this chart, you mean:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog...

Yes, exactly, but actually attached to all tables/charts and not just a few. It's not an accident that the small sample size tables don't have confidence intervals. Those are the tables that need them the most to indicate that the estimated values should be taken with a huge block of salt.

Re:Bottom line

[KiloByte]

There's a big benefit to Backblaze for publishing these yearly stats: this ensures their drive purchases will be the cream of the crop, reducing their replacement costs.

I believe this concern outweighs those (valid) concerns you listed.

Re:Bottom line

[SirMasterboy]

All the disks that Backblaze has installed in their servers that are HGST are old disks, purchased before WD even bought Hitachi. None of the HGST models they mention are currently even purchasable.

Re:Bottom line

[larryjoe]

There's a big benefit to Backblaze for publishing these yearly stats: this ensures their drive purchases will be the cream of the crop, reducing their replacement costs.

I believe this concern outweighs those (valid) concerns you listed.

I totally agree about the value of the availability of this data. I applaud Backblaze for releasing the numbers and actually attaching manufacturer names and models to the numbers.

Re:Bottom line

[KiloByte]

I meant a far more cynical explanation than how you understood my comment. Cynical for drive manufacturers, that is.

Re:Bottom line

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Seagate certainly did not cover themselves with glory here. I'm disappointed by how far WD has fallen, but the writing was on the wall with the last couple years' reports. Glad I read those and moved to HGST.

I'm not a Seagate fanboi or anything but did you even look past that first chart or are you just purely talking out of your ass? With exception of the two obvious outliers that don't have enough drives to be statistically relevant, Seagate averaged a 1% higher failure rate than WD. That's basically meaningless, even to data centers. All the manufacturers are basically within 2% of each other, which is about the best you're going to find for any consumer product.

I have 15 HGST 4TB drives and have had 2 fail so far. They're hardly failure proof so I hope you aren't relying on the brand to mean ANYTHING. Thankfully they were raided and of course the important info is always backed up. Also, HGST won't ship an RMA first unless you give them shit, which is annoying. For reference, I also have 6 Seagate drives of similar age/use and none have failed. Brand is irrelevant. Buy what costs the least with a decent warranty and backup what's important because no matter what brand you buy, it will fail one day.

Re: Bottom line

[Anonymous Coward]

If they play out like the 8TB drives itâ(TM)ll be amazing I bet.

Also WD Reds are HGST drives with a different spinner motor.

Re:Bottom line

[Anonymous Coward]

Western Dataloss has fallen? They've got nowhere to fall to unless they start shipping the drives already dead.

They've always made the worst drives. They made about 10% of the drives I touch, and they're well over 50% of the failures I've replaced.

Re:Bottom line

[KozmoStevnNaut]

I have been buying exclusively HGST hard drives for a while now, because they're not actually that much more expensive, and as BackBlaze's numbers show, they're by far the most reliable.

For SSDs, I guess Samsung is still king, if we ignore the debacle with the 840 Evo and stick to the Pro versions.

Re:Bottom line

[thegarbz]

So like... what is going on here with WD if their HGST line is so much better than their regular line?

HGST has been kept at arms length since their purchase by WD. They may share a corporate financial statement but effectively they remain two separate companies in most of the ways that matter.

Re:Bottom line

[lgw]

Their low-end consumer drives are crap, but they used to make great drives if you got the "enterprise" ones with the 5 year warranty.

Re:Bottom line

[Gr8Apes]

I'm curious how Seagate screwed things up so badly. They bought Samsung's HDD division some years ago and I found that Samsung produced some incredibly reliable drives

Probably because they shutdown Samsung? Buying a rival and all.

Re: Bottom line

[slashrio]

Got any reference?

Re:Bottom line

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm actually somewhat impressed with how much they've improved.

I remember back when about 80GB was top of the line, the spare drive shelf contained exactly 0 WD drives. Because every WD drive would fail before it was time to retire it for being too small/slow. Keep in mind this shelf had Maxtor drives, Quantum drives, and if you dug deep enough even some old Conner drives. But nothing from WD.

Re:Bottom line

[Anonymous Coward]

all my drives have either been seagate or maxtor since i was born, and i have never had a hard drive fail

you are probably storing way too much porn in them, way more than me anyway

STAY. FAR. AWAY. FROM. SEAGATE.

[Anonymous Coward]

Member Randi Van De Loo? He said so 100 years ago.

HGST for personal use

[Anonymous Coward]

For like the 5th year in a row HGST has the lowest failure rates.

For personal use it's clear HGST is the way to go. Sure you pay a few extra bucks, but I don't have a massive data farm with redundant data spread out all over the place.I can't afford multiple drive failures.

Re:HGST for personal use

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with that is that they're Western Dataloss drives now, there is no more HGST.

Re:HGST for personal use

[KozmoStevnNaut]

They're still running as separate divisions, with their own R&D.

From what I hear, WD Reds are HGSTs with a different motor, though.

Boooooring

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we get some stats about something interesting like APK Hosts File Engine Turbo 2 Alpha Extreme edition?!

How many machines use this software?
How many hosts entries are in a typical file?
Can we see metrics of this blazing fast kernel level speed?

These are the questions we sloshditters want answered!

APK for FCC Chairman 2018

Re:Boooooring

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap do I ever want to suck your dick right now.

predictive models for app conversions and churn

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi I’m Bilal, cofounder of ClearBrain (https://clearbrain.com). ClearBrain helps you automatically build predictive models for which of your users are most likely to convert or churn in your app. Think AmazonML for marketing analysts.

Our founding team comes from Optimizely & Google where we built similar predictive tools for our marketing teams. At each company, we kept building the same components of a predictive pipeline - javascript snippets to collect data, ETL jobs to transform that data, and cron jobs to run a regression. We were spending hours a week maintaining these pipelines, but the time-consuming part wasn’t the algorithms (as they’re open sourced) it was the transformations.

So with ClearBrain we decided to automate the data transformation steps. We built our system in Spark ML (scala), Data Pipeline, and Go. Instead of instrumenting yet another Javascript snippet, we use existing data in Segment (YC S11) and Heap (YC W13) through standard integrations. And because every Segment/Heap dataset has the same schema, our system can process it with the same transformations into a machine-readable feature matrix. When a customer selects a user action tracked in Segment/Heap to predict, our transformed matrix is run through a logistic regression via Spark ML, and outputs a probabilistic score for each user to perform that action based on users who performed it in the past.

This distills the predictive modeling process to a simple UI to identify high-probability users in minutes. We’ve built the tool with marketers in mind, to help them identify which users may convert or churn, and export those users to marketing tools like Facebook Ads, Hubspot, etc. We’ve also found good reception from startups that have marketing objectives but lack the resources to deploy ML-driven campaigns themselves.

We look forward to feedback from the /. community! :)

Bilal

Re:predictive models for app conversions and churn

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I'm A/C, founder of fuck-the-fuck-off, the new app for getting rid of annoying advertising cunts in places where they're not wanted. How does it work?

FUCK THE FUCK OFF BILAL

Re:predictive models for app conversions and churn

[Anonymous Coward]

ClearBrain's mission is to build a self-service AI to predict any human behavior.

Our first product is a predictive analytics layer to help marketers automatically identify which users will convert or churn, and personalize their marketing in minutes w/o a single line of code.

We're a small, tight-nit, experienced team from Google, Optimizely, Uber, & DraftKings (cofounders were the first SRE on Google Ads, and led data science at Optimizely), and well-funded by investors in Dropbox, Optimizely, and AppDynamics. We're working with mid-market to public companies driving over 40% lift on terabytes of data processed, and are looking for someone to lead our frontend infra and guide product design and direction.

If you're interested in making machine learning and predictive analytics accessible to everyone, we'd love for you to join us.

You can email me directly at bilal@clearbrain.com, or find more info on AngelList https://angel.co/clearbrain/jobs/264140-full-stack-engineer

Re:predictive models for app conversions and churn

[zidium]

https://angel.co/clearbrain/jo... no longer works :-/

Re:predictive models for app conversions and churn

[Anonymous Coward]

We’re hiring our first engineers, where you would lead our architecture development across O(terabyte) datasets, build scalable API driver platforms, and design an automated machine learning pipeline.

Please contact us directly at bilal@clearbrain.com if interested!

Re:predictive models for app conversions and churn

[Anonymous Coward]

Go back to your community college for another degree in business. Any company that would staff by subverting technology forums doesn't have the funding to hire intelligent good engineers. Anyone dumb enough to be hired by you probably buys their drugs from email spam and dates those Russian women dying to meet you. Those are not people I want to work with. And your product is going to be worthless crap, just like you.

Re:predictive models for app conversions and churn

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't call them engineers when they are unlikely to have ever studied engineering (pre-requisite qualification in most parts of the planet) and are most likely low wage shit-kickers.

This is the reason I only us HGST

[dkone]

I have used nothing but HGST drives for all the machines I have built, including NAS's, for as long as I can remember. This is an awesome study and I am sure it probably has some peeps at seagate steaming right about now.

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[umafuckit]

The only time I tried HGST was when I bought half a dozen of them for a trial. One failed out of the box and another lasted a week. Clearly I got unlucky, but it didn't encourage me to repeat the experience. I generally buy WD because the failure rate is acceptable and there is a good return policy which is easy to use.

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[nuckfuts]

Yes, HGST drive are the most reliable, but they're also very expensive.

It's ironic that when RAID was invented it stood for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. This was later revised to stand for Redundant Array of Independent Disks.

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[Anonymous Coward]

"This customer uses home consumer-grade hardware not intended for an enterprise data center environment, in such an environment. Had they used Seagate's world-class global-leading enterprise-caliber hardware, their experience would be much more favorable." --Seagate rep

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[Strider-]

Oddly, when I was shopping for 8TB drives for my NAS recently, the HGST 7200rpm Helium drives were cheaper than the equivalent WD Reds or Seagates. So yeah, they're not always the most expensive out there. I think I paid $250 CAD each for the drives. The WDs and Seagates were about $15 more. So yeah, HGST isn't always the most expensive, especially if you shop.

If you're shucking drives, that's another matter.

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[dkone]

Your statement is not helping your cause at all. It is comforting to know that you are ok selling the shit drives to the consumer. So I stick with my original premise, this is why I only use HGST drives. No sense of confusion or having Seagate blame me because I chose their wrong product line.

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[Archangel Michael]

Except that ... BackBlaze has addressed this issue before.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog...

While I acknowledge that things may have changed since that particular report came out, it is up to Seagate to provide the actual real world testing that BackBlaze has, to prove different.

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[Kopp]

Despite that, they still use a lot of Seagate drives anyway... So the higher failure rate is not deterring them from the brand

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[KingMotley]

While I can attest to just how bad seagate's DM-series drives actually are (I had a dozen or so 3TB DM-series myself, and they typically died in less than a year). That said, the DM-series isn't meant to be used in that way. They aren't designed to put in a box connector facing down, with little heat dissipation and with high vibration. It does appear the 8TB DM model actually holds up really well, even in this environment
.
The NM-series (Enterprise class) did fair above average. I just wish that backblaze would have a bigger sampling of their actual NAS-class drives (VN-series).

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[fred6666]

It's because you shopped for NAS-specific drives. Seagate often makes much cheaper non-NAS drives.
Still, $250 is good, it's now about $300.

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[Strider-]

The only cheaper ones I found were the archive drives, which use SMR, which is fine for backups and read-mostly workloads, but not really suitable for random access. Their normal drives were about the same as the NAS drives.

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[fred6666]

maybe this has changed, but it clearly wasn't the case when they first launched "NAS" and "RAID" drives.

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[dj245]

I have used nothing but HGST drives for all the machines I have built, including NAS's, for as long as I can remember. This is an awesome study and I am sure it probably has some peeps at seagate steaming right about now.

Why? Backblaze is still buying palletfuls of Seagate drives based on their drive counts of the 12TB and 10TB drives. I believe it was explained last year that the amortized $/operating year was lower that other brands, even with the increased failure rate.

Making that kind of decision depends on how tolerant of failure the purchaser is, the cost of replacement, and how many drives they are purchasing. Some large storage companies don't even bother replacing failed drives, they just disable them.

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but if you're using them in a NAS and use non-NAS drives you'll pay for it a different way when the drive has a timeout and gets booted from the array.

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[thegarbz]

Yes experience with devices that have generally low failure rates is often based on luck. Two in one box? Did you check the box for damages in the corners? I'll bet you a dollar the box was dropped or worse, handled by UPS.

I have had the same problem with WD. I have 8 identical model 4TB HDDs in my system. 2 of them failed out of the box with nothing but a click on bootup, and after they were replaced the entire set hadn't missed a beat.

I'm very willing to accept infant mortality providing the random failure rate is low.

Re: This is the reason I only us HGST

[Anonymous Coward]

they may have no other choice. you do know that they get what is available at the best price point. some sellers have better deals, or seagate are the only drives available at the volume required by backblaze at purchase time.

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[umafuckit]

No obvious damage, which was odd. Otherwise I'd have returned the whole box and started again.

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[thegarbz]

I actually wonder if anyone actually puts their HDDs through a S.M.A.R.T. test when they first get them. The "Conveyance" self test is specifically designed to detect damage during shipping. Although, I'm not quite sure what it does or if it is useful.

Re:This is the reason I only us HGST

[umafuckit]

I didn't know about that. Interesting. I'm about to move a bunch of servers which together comprise of over a PB of storage. I'll look into running that test on the other end.

Does Google/Amazon release their HD stats?

[BrookHarty]

Wondering if any other storage company releases their HD failure rates?

Re:Does Google/Amazon release their HD stats?

[toddestan]

Google did a long time ago, though unlike BackBlaze they didn't call out who made the drives.

predictive analytics

[Anonymous Coward]

predictive analytics

This is actually pretty funny. How could they not predict that they would get ripped apart posting this here? I don't do predictive analytics and even I could have predicted this. They must not be very good at what they do.

Re:predictive analytics

[Anonymous Coward]

It is funny.
But impossible to say if it's actually them posting this or not. I could obviously copy paste the original comment on every single Slashdot post and make everyone mad at them. Since it was posted as AC, same as this -- no way to verify it was actually them the first time.

Stacks of dead Seagates

[BenJeremy]

I have them. 20+ dead Seagates... internals and externals. Only 2 drives in the past 10 years have survived... yet I have no dead Hitachis, one dead Samsung and a couple dead WDs.

Seagate and Maxtor merging combined the worst of both companies into one terrible behemoth.

Also, drive prices still suck. The floods in Thailand were an excuse to gouge customers as insurance companies funded the construction of shiny new plants capable of producing 10+TB drives as fast and as cheaply as they had been churning out 2TB drives (for around $45 - 7 years ago!). We should be getting 10TB drives for $50 by now.

Re:Stacks of dead Seagates

[Anonymous Coward]

The only drives I had that were worse than Maxtor, were Conner (also bought by Seagate).

Re:Stacks of dead Seagates

[thegarbz]

I have them. 20+ dead Seagates... internals and externals. Only 2 drives in the past 10 years have survived... yet I have no dead Hitachis, one dead Samsung and a couple dead WDs.

The problem with anecdotes is you need a lot of them to separate statistics from sheer dumb luck. While Segates are generally shit I have 3 of them (2 in RAID 1 and one standalone). The standalone one is in this computer from which I'm typing and has 9 years of power on time on it. The 2 in the RAID array are 7 and 8 years. Respectively.

Mind you I also seem to own the last remaining OCZ Vertex 3 that hasn't died, and it's been plodding along for a good 7 years. Maybe storage loves me, or maybe the HDD is analysing my porn collection and afraid of what I may do it if it disobeys me.

Re:Stacks of dead Seagates

[fox171171]

I have them. 20+ dead Seagates... internals and externals. Only 2 drives in the past 10 years have survived... yet I have no dead Hitachis, one dead Samsung and a couple dead WDs.

The problem with anecdotes is you need a lot of them to separate statistics from sheer dumb luck. While Segates are generally shit

This is true. In this case though, I have seen a lot of anecdotal evidence of Seagate drives being crap.

I also have my own anecdotes on the subject. Seagate drives I have had all had abysmally short lives. I never got a big stack of dead Seagate's though, as I stopped buying them. There were some duds at work too, and I told them to stop buying them too.

Re:Stacks of dead Seagates

[toddestan]

I end up working on a few friend's/family member's computers, so I've seen my fair share of dead and dying Seagate drives.

However, my anecdote is I bought no less than four of the infamous Seagate 1.5 TB drives back when they first came out. I still have all four, and despite being nearly a decade old, they all still work and have never given me a lick of trouble. I don't use them for anything important anymore, but I'm still using them.

Re:Stacks of dead Seagates

[thegarbz]

Oh I agree and frankly the wider data reflects that. I'm just saying to take care when using anecdotes. By my own anecdote I would say Seagate is more reliable then WD, but people's anecdotes (including mine) have such low sample sizes that you may as well flip coins.

Hell in my household we have 100% success rate with OCZ SSDs. Frankly I have no idea why they went out of business :-)

Re:Stacks of dead Seagates

[Anonymous Coward]

i have a maxtor from 2002 that still works, its on a computer that has been torrenting hard until 2013 or something like that, and still torrents at night from time to time

it still works

i have a seagate from 2008, im typing on it right now

statistics from people that have countless hdds right next to another in huge rigs mean shit for me, im not using my computer that way
im still buying a seagate on my next pc

Short summary

[DrTJ]

Seagate SG4000 series life expectancy: 32 years
Average HD life expectancy: 50 years
HGST HDS5C series: 167 years

Re:Short summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Seagate SG4000 series life expectancy: 32 years
Average HD life expectancy: 50 years
HGST HDS5C series: 167 years

Reality:
Seagate: 20 minutes after the warranty runs out

Re:Short summary

[fox171171]

Seagate SG4000 series life expectancy: 32 years Average HD life expectancy: 50 years HGST HDS5C series: 167 years

I have always felt like there's a huge disconnect between the advertised life expectancy of products and reality. It seems wrong that they can say that a product will last a long time, yet the short warranty suggests that they are aware that their claims are full of crap.

I hate to say "there oughta be a law", but as a consumer protection, I think that there should be a requirement to have a statement about the expected lifespan of the product, along with a statement about the warranty. This should apply to a great many things.

An example of a label on the package would be one that says "The life expectancy of this product is 50 years. The warranty is therefore a generous 45 years to reflect our confidence in our products."

Or, "We don't expect our products to last much more than a year. Therefore our warranty is only 90 days, and even that is higher than we'd like."

Other Drive failure causes/correlations

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious if vendor is the most strongly correlated factor to drive failure. I could imagine that bad PDUs could cause drive failures across vendors, or different data centers or racking methods or ...

The Seagate rep did not consider the full meaning.

[Futurepower(R)]

"Had they used Seagate's world-class global-leading enterprise-caliber hardware, their experience would be much more favorable." --Seagate rep"

So, what does that mean? Does Seagate deliberately make drives that have a higher failure rate? Why?

What is Seagate's "enterprise-caliber"? Is there a "sloppy-manufacturing caliber" or a bad-design caliber"?

The Backblaze statistics are of limited use because only a few were tested of many of the drive models.

Are we looking at the same charts?

[Solandri]

Only two of the Seagate drive models (ST400DM001, ST400DM005) had excessively high failure rates, and the worst one (ST400DM005) had been in use the shortest time of all drive models in the report by far and suffered a single failure. The confidence interval chart shows this - the low end of the confidence interval of that model is 0.0% - meaning for all we know it could be the most reliable drive in the report, it just had the misfortune of a random failure soon after they began using it.

Subtract those two models, and Seagate's aggregate failure rate is lower than WD's.

Whenever Backblaze puts one of these reports out, I keep having to tell people: Every drive model tries using different components and different technologies to eek out better performance and capacity. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The way you should be using these reports is to decide which drive models to avoid, not which manufacturer. That's why Backblaze breaks it down by drive model, and apparently they've wisened up and not made a chart summarizing each manufacturer.

Re:Are we looking at the same charts?

[Walter White]

If you look further back in history (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/) you will see that Seagate had miserable results with early 'large' drives (1.5, 2 TB.) I found this unfortunate as I had really good luck with a bunch of 200GB Seagate barracudas I bought for my first RAID setup. I suppose the troublesome drives are based on the same or similar designs and share a flaw that causes high failure rates. I purchased two 2TB Barracudas and both eventually failed. Anecdotal, and not statistically significant, but significant enough to me. I think (hope!) Seagate have addressed this issue and more modern drives such as their 8TB models of which I have purchased one do not share a high failure rate. Were I to buy another 8TB drive today I'm sure I'd go with an HGST He8 (HUH728080ALE600)

I suspect your claim is true that there is more variability between drive models (particularly if families based on the same design are lumped together) than manufacturers. Nevertheless it seems to me that some manufacturers avoid producing troublesome models.

Re:Are we looking at the same charts?

[AmiMoJo]

The most important lesson is: back your data up or suffer data loss every 5-10 years.

I'm sure Backblaze would like you to use their service, but I prefer SpiderOak.

Interpreting the data

[Trogre]

Can someone explain to me how the Seagate ST4000DM005, of which they had sixty running and a single failure in a quarter, equate to a massive 29.08% annualized failure rate?

They make an attempt to explain that case at the bottom of the page but it makes no sense to me. With a single failure causing such massive spikes I'd be leaving them off as "insufficient data" or at least introducing some error bars.

Re:Interpreting the data

[edwdig]

They explain that the report includes any drive they have at least 45 of in use. They don't say why that's the cutoff, but they do point out that the stats aren't meaningful with the low numbers of drives.

Those 60 drives were running for an average of 21 days each. One drive failed in that time. (1 failure / 60 drives) * (365 days/year / 21 days) = 29% drives fail yearly

It's not enough data to conclude anything. They just started deploying a new model and one drive died immediately, which looks awful if you scale that data up to a year. It tells you nothing about long term trends though.

Nice...

[XSportSeeker]

I see that Seagate continues being a piece of shit drive, and quite unfortunately the only one at reasonable price that I can find in the local market.
Oh well...

Interesting study but incomplete

[HuguesT]

Backblaze is a backup service company. Basically, all they do with their drives is put them up in a bespoke cabinet, slowly fill them up with data at internet speed, then let them running for a long time doing hardly anything at all. Infrequently, when someone loses some data somehere, they read a small portion of them. This is very far from what most people do with their drives. In particular read/write performance and reliability does not matter to Backblaze.

Re:Interesting study but incomplete

[Anonymous Coward]

"Backblaze is a backup service company" and " reliability does not matter to Backblaze" are incompatible statements.

Re:Interesting study but incomplete

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, but I congratulate them on a name that manages to sound both 420-positive and vaguely homoerotic...

Re:Interesting study but incomplete

[thegarbz]

This is very far from what most people do with their drives.

Define most. It's becoming incredibly bloody common for someone to have a small NAS unit somewhere in their house. Spinning rust is basically relegated to these kinds of services now where SSDs form the core part of your day to day computing.

Re:Interesting study but incomplete

[sl3xd]

Infrequently, when someone loses some data somehere, they read a small portion of them

Checksumming filesystems (WAFL, ZFS, etc.) are the standard for large arrays, and it's pretty foolish to not run a scrub operation regularly -- at least weekly, possibly more often than that.

If they're doing their job, reads will outnumber writes by several orders of magnitude.

Seagate still at the top

[Anonymous Coward]

With the highest failure rates.

Ummm

[Jfetjunky]

This is neat and all, but I didn't see a mention of how the data is normalized in time. Just blindly comparing how many of a particular drive failed any given quarter is misleading at best. Their failures must be normalized in time. i.e. the failure rate must be scaled by the amount of time in service.

This is usually specified as FIT (failures in time). It makes no sense to directly compare a batch of drives that might have only been in service 1 year with ones that might have been in service for 1 day.

Maybe they are doing something like this, but it doesn't seem like it.

Re:Ummm

[Jfetjunky]

Eh, after looking more I think they are calling it "drive days".

Re:The Seagate rep did not consider the full meani

[Anonymous Coward]

On order for Seagate to be at the top of most failures every year, I would have to say yes. They are doing it deliberately.

This is the kind of story...

[Wolfrider]

...that I most look forward to on Slashdot. I wish they'd also publish more stuff on SSD torture testing / failure rates.

Re:This is the kind of story...

[KozmoStevnNaut]

As far as I can tell, you can expect at least 500TB of writes to any decent SSD you buy today, which is way beyond what the drive lifetime counter in SMART tells you. Some of them soldier on for much longer than that.

I've been using a Samsung 840 Evo (yes, the shitty ones that needed firmware patches to not eat themselves over time) as my system drive sinec 2013, and it just keeps on trucking. I have a swap partition on it, I haven't bothered moving the /var partition to a HDD to save on writes, I actually haven't done anything to reduce writes at all, other than putting 16GB of RAM in my machine, to reduce swapping.

It's currently at 2% on the wear counter, which I think is set to consider the drive "worn out" at 100TB of writes, or something similarly low.

American brands crap, Japanese brands superior

[Anonymous Coward]

this is actually the summary for 2017, and it was true for 2016 and 2015 as well. If you want reliability and quality, buy Toshiba or Hitachi/HGST, avoid Western Digital/WDC and Seagate.

There is no data for IBM, if they even make HDDs anymore, but most likely they follow the WD and Seagate trend. It is what it is.