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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).
Do any other cloud-storage services publish stats like this?
Thank you, Backblaze.
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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