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

[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.

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.

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.

Does Google/Amazon release their HD stats?

[BrookHarty]

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

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.

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.

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:Ummm

[Jfetjunky]

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

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.