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Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2017 (backblaze.com)

Posted by msmash on from the pit-against-each-another dept.

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.

8 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Bottom line by ArchieBunker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    1. Re:Bottom line by slaker · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      -- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
    2. Re:Bottom line by omfglearntoplay · · Score: 4, Informative

      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."

    3. Re:Bottom line by slaker · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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?

      --
      -- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
  2. This is the reason I only us HGST by dkone · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:This is the reason I only us HGST by umafuckit · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      soylentnews.org
  3. Stacks of dead Seagates by BenJeremy · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  4. Interesting study but incomplete by HuguesT · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.