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How Reliable Are 10TB and 12TB Hard Drives? Backblaze Publishes Q1 2018 Hard Drive Reliability (zdnet.com)
Wolfrider writes: Backblaze's hard drive report for the first quarter 2018 makes very interesting reading for anyone who is interested in hard drive performance and reliability. As of March 31, 2018, the company had 100,110 hard drives working for it, made up of 1,922 boot drives and 98,188 data drives, ranging from 3TB WDC WD30EFRX drives all the way up to 10TB and 12TB Seagate ST10000NM0086 and ST12000NM0007 drives, along with 10 Samsung 850 EVO SSDs. [...] The overall Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) for Q1 sat at just 1.2 percent, well below the Q4 2017 AFR of 1.65 percent. Some drives had an AFR of 0 percent (in other words, no drives failed during the period), while the 4TB Seagate ST4000DM000 had the highest AFR of 2.3 percent (out of 30,941 drives the company had in service, 178 failed during the Q1 period).
...and we can have a "discussion" about this.
Once upon a time in the penultimate decade of the last century, I was chief fixer dude for a manufacturer which had built some custom stuff Seagate used to bulk-test drives in their engineering department. That stuff kept coming back for warranty service but nothing was ever found to be wrong with it, which was a red flag, and the creation of the test setup required about six hours of tech labor so the damn flag was on fire. I got nowhere in my first round of calls to Seagate, but when the stuff came back yet again I was more persistent and finally got to the bottom of it.
Seagate had a guy who was somehow involved with that engineering test system, and every time something went wrong, whether it was an actual system failure or just an unexpected outcome, said guy jerked everything still under warranty out of the system and sent it back to the manufacturers for service. Everything, whether it was potentially related to the troubling observation or not. In driving my way to someone in charge I spoke with folks at Seagate who were incredibly frustrated with the shotgun approach because it kept their test system out of service for far longer than it ever should have been, and eventually they allowed me to reach the shotgun monkey's boss's boss. I explained to him that our warranty terms applied only to product which had failed in normal service, and that on-demand conformance testing was a full pop T&M (time and materials) service for which they would henceforth be charged.
The stuff was not seen again in the time I remained employed by that company and I've happily avoided Seagate ever since.
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