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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).
Their "lifetime" chart,however, might reveal a different story...
HGST 4TB's (three different models) look the best, if I'm interpreting the data correctly...
My laptop has 2 x 1Tb drives.
Both are full.
I don't even go mad - I store no video, I don't even OWN any music, my family photos take up about a gig.
But things like virtual machines, programming environments, and even installing, say, 10% of my Steam games fills my hard drives up ludicrously fast.
Compare and contrast to my workplace - where we have about 20-30Gb for each user at maximum and about 10% of that is used. 600+ users, 12Tb of active storage (not counting reserved space, backup, replication, etc.).
It very much depends on what you want to do, but my Steam library could easily hit 300-400Gb on its own. If anyone else used the laptop but me you could likely have each user doing that.
Then things like virtual machines etc. can whack it up enormously.
If you're not a gamer, a video-hoarder, a photographer, a content-creator, a developer, etc. then, sure, you can cope on less space.
Personally, I'm just glad my laptop has two drive bays.
Anecdotal evidence:
I've been at my current workplace for 4 years. In that time EVERY SINGLE Seagate-branded drive has failed - dozens and dozens of them. In RAID arrays, in servers (15K SAS etc.), in NAS, in desktops, in clients.
Replacing with WD as we go - and repurposing old WDs they already had to serve in the Seagate's places - I've had precisely one WD failure. And we think that took a whack because it hit the floor.
Seagate drives honestly are shocking in their build quality.
I still believe that the best hard drives are Western Digital Black and Gold models. I have some that are well past their prime and should have failed but keep on reliably clicking away. I just re-formatted one and still no bad sectors.
Do any other cloud-storage services publish stats like this?
Thank you, Backblaze.
Yeah the HGST drives are looking very good. The seagate drives (the first 2, might work out to the better investment though; due to being 2.5 to 3 times the size).
(ie If you have 1000 seagate 12TB drives (12000TB), and need to replace 10 per year (1% failure rate), that might still work out better than having 3000 HGST 4TB drives (the same 12000TB), where you need to replace 0.5% year because that's 15 of them.
I'm guessing that 10 12TB costs probably costs around twice as much as a 15 of the 4TB drives, but the power, and space, and enclosure cost savings of the higher density still might put the seagates ahead.
Depends on
No, that's not what the report shows at all. The first chart you're basing that on is the stats for this quarter alone. Seagate drives failed the most simply because Backblaze uses a lot more Seagate drives than other brand drives.
The chart you want to look at is the last one in the report - lifetime failure rates. Mainly the annualized failure rate and confidence interval high/low columns. Those percentages take into account the number of drives in the sample, and how many days they've been in service. WD drives are by far the worst, with the highest annualized failure rate. Only a single Seagate drive model performs worse than the best WD drive model (which has a small sample size so the confidence interval is large - i.e. the uncertainty in its failure rate is large).
Past Backblaze reports also tried to normalize by years in service (under the assumption that drives which have been in use longer have a higher chance of failing). But they don't seem to be doing that anymore.
couple months back, a separate division of my employer had 3 of a 16 disk group fail within 2 days -- killing a raid-6 group. These were 8TB seagate disks and were ~6 months old.
This is why, as a rule, you shouldn't populate a RAID with drives from the same manufactured batch.
I have a wide variety of drives at work, both HDD and SSD. I mostly buy "enterprise" grade drives, and specifically look for models with a 5-year warranty. What I've discovered recently, however, is that here are huge differences in how manufacturers fulfill their warranties. When a drive fails, what I'm looking for is to obtain a replacement as soon as possible. I can live with a degraded RAID array for a few days, perhaps, but not for weeks. With an "Advance RMA", the manufacturer will ship a replacement drive immediately rather than waiting to receive the defective drive. (A credit card is provided to cover their loss if the defective drive is never received).
My most recent experiences can be summarized as follows:
Western Digital HDD - Advance RMA is available
Seagate HDD - Advance RMA is not available
HGST HDD - Advance RMA is not available
Even with Advance RMA, I have to wait for ground shipping. I wish that expedited (air) shipping was also available.
I'm saving a special category of experiences for Intel SSDs - experiences so awful there are in a class by themselves. I've had the misfortune to suffer two failed Intel SSDs. Both happened to be M.2 format SSDs. One was SATA, the other NVMe. Firstly, just getting an RMA started with Intel is painful. Be prepared to disassemble whatever computer is affected, because providing a model number and serial number are not enough. They also require something called an "SA" number that can only be found on a sticker attached to the device. Second, be prepared to wait a LONG time. I'm talking weeks to MONTHS to get a replacement. If you need the affected computer back up and running within a reasonable timeframe, you'll need to purchase another SSD in spite of your warranty coverage.
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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I don't care about sales, eps and growth.
I care about hard drive reliability.
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