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