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posted by martyb on Friday November 18 2016, @06:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the spinning-rust-still-has-its-place dept.

The cloud storage company BACKBLAZE has published another in their series of quarterly articles looking into Disk Drive failure rates.

The company had 68,813 spinning hard drives in operation. For Q3 2016 they have 67,642 drives, which is 1,171 fewer than their last quarterly report. The decline is because they have been migrating from their 2 terabyte (TB) drives to 8 TB models. They currently run a mix of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 TB drives in their cloud storage system from a mix of different vendors.

The 8 TB drives are too new to reflect anything other than infant mortality rates, but all of the other sizes have been heavily used for years, such that some brand-specific trends are starting to appear.

The results are summarized in a table with the key metric being Annualized Failure Rate which is computed as follows: ((Failures)/(Drive Days/365)) * 100.

The Seagate 8 TB drives are doing very well. Their annualized failure rate compares favorably to the HGST 2 TB hard drives. With the average age of the HGST drives being 66 months, their failure rate was likely to rise, simply because of normal wear and tear. The average age of the Seagate 8 TB hard drives is just 3 months, but their 1.6% failure rate during the first few months bodes well for a continued low failure rate going forward.

Still, when you look at all the brands and models involved, the HGST brand seem to show the lowest failure rates historically.

With some reporting failure rates over 10% annually, mirrored drives may still be a wise choice for not trusting in the cloud.


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  • (Score: 2) by MrNemesis on Friday November 18 2016, @12:34PM

    by MrNemesis (1582) on Friday November 18 2016, @12:34PM (#428802)

    Anecdata time...

    Personally we've experienced higher failure rates in our NAS racks with the WD reds than we have with the WD greens (with their idle timer disabled via idle3-tools). Only have experience from the 3TB and 6TB ranges of both to compare.

    Mechanically, the reds and greens are identical, it's only the firmware that differs as far as we can tell. Once the greens have the idle time disabled they're also identical in power usage and performance. The difference between the two is mostly just artificial market segmentation.

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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday November 18 2016, @01:45PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday November 18 2016, @01:45PM (#428815) Journal

    Speaking of anecdata, of the 4 drives I have purchased in the last 10 years for personal use, 2 were WD, and they both died early. I bought a WD black to replace the WD green when it died after just 9 months, then the black failed 4 years later and I decided I definitely didn't want another WD, and got a Toshiba to replace that. (The 4th drive is whatever 32G SSD is inside an Asus Vivostick, it's less than a year old and works fine.) I see that the Backblaze data shows a much higher failure rate for WD.

    In the near 30 years I've been using hard drives, the only failures I've had are those 2 WD drives. I still have most of my old drives and they all still work.

    • (Score: 2) by RedGreen on Friday November 18 2016, @03:23PM

      by RedGreen (888) on Friday November 18 2016, @03:23PM (#428866)

      "In the near 30 years I've been using hard drives, the only failures I've had are those 2 WD drives. I still have most of my old drives and they all still work."

      Well in my thirty + years of using them just about every seagate I have owned in the 1tb and above size have died still have one 1.5 and 1 1tb living out of ~20 purchased. The WD drives bought to replace them failures all of the green variety 3 have went titsup.

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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday November 18 2016, @10:12PM

    by frojack (1554) on Friday November 18 2016, @10:12PM (#429142) Journal

    Wait, what?
    First you said

    we've experienced higher failure rates in our NAS racks with the WD reds than we have with the WD greens

    Then you followed up with:

    Its only the firmware that differes ... Once the greens have the idle time disabled they're also identical in power usage and performance.

    Your own data seems to suggest there is more difference than just firmware if your high priced drives are more problematic than your low priced drives.

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