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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.

4 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.

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    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.

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    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."

  2. 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.

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