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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: 3, Informative) by ledow on Friday November 18 2016, @03:37PM

    by ledow (5567) on Friday November 18 2016, @03:37PM (#428877) Homepage

    150 machines running WD Blue's in a high-use end-user environment (boarding school). Failures number in the single digits, 3 years later.

    By comparison, Seagate's sitting in relatively idle NAS or servers. Failure rate: Absolute. Every single drive. RAID array, or not. Single disk, or not. 24/7 usage, or not. Even put into the above client machines as replacements.

    Replaced most of the NAS with WD Red as the drives started to fail, and all new purchases. 3 years later, zero failures.

    BladeCenter servers with integrated DSM on 24/7 with constant VM replication and RAID. 3 years later, zero failures. And they use the original official IBM drives. In fact, halfway through we added more DSM's so there's now twice as many disks spinning in those.

    Yeah, it's all anecdotal, but when even the non-techy users could draw a correlation, you have to question why you wouldn't use that real-world data. Whether it's our use case, usage pattern, location, altitude, humidity? Who knows. I just know that every time I see a Seagate I just replace it with WD at the first opportunity.

    P.S. Dozens of the cheapest Crucial SSDs I could find - a year down the line, zero failures and 100% lifetime remaining still (literally not enough write to make it round down to 99%).

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @04:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @04:31PM (#428914)

    FWIW, reads also use up the usable lifetime of SSDs, but at a much slower rate. It is also worth running SMART tests on SSDs every so often because they use the time to fix some problems before they become big problems. Also, an offline data collection is probably necessary to update some of the values in the attribute table.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @05:30PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @05:30PM (#428942)

      I have found the seagate constellation series of disk drive to be, by far, the most reliable they sell.

      I had a hybdrid drive fail on me after 3 years; it had a 2 year warranty. It was light use (signifcant other's desktop).The constellations are still going--in my desktop.

      I have western digital black drives that are 10 years old and still going; smart statistics say they are still good. Those are on 24x7 in a file server.

      Probably, I will buy more western digital black drives. I generally try to buy only drives with a 5 year warranty (if not more), but I went cheap and got the hybrid drive -- and it was the first drive to fail me that died before it's acceptable use case had retired it. I have many older drives that werent allowed to die due to being replaced; this hybrid wasn't even half filled yet, and was in a PC that would go for days without even being turned on.

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday November 18 2016, @10:34PM

      by frojack (1554) on Friday November 18 2016, @10:34PM (#429153) Journal

      And furthermore, 1 year isn't a valid test for an SSD.

      I think it was mentioned here on SN earlier: SSDs all outlive their warranted life time by absurd orders of magnitude. [techreport.com]

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
  • (Score: 2) by TheLink on Saturday November 19 2016, @11:04AM

    by TheLink (332) on Saturday November 19 2016, @11:04AM (#429357) Journal

    See also: http://www.hardware.fr/articles/947-6/disques-durs.html [hardware.fr]

    Notice their 6TB WD Red numbers don't look as bad as BackBlaze's (but still worse than the greens.