SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 4, Informative) by frojack on Friday November 18 2016, @10:08PM
That the drives are not designed for the amount of 24x7 vibration that occurs in a case with 48+ total spinning drives packed together.
Having 48 drives spinning cause no vibration (none that wouldn't be completely absorbed by the drive's own case.
48 drives seeking might cause some vibration, but with 48 they are as likely to cancel each other out as to amplify each other.
I suspect this reasoning is EXACTLY the type of nonsense that RedBear was talking about. Silly un-provable claims made by arm chair wizards who run exactly 1 drive in their laptop.
With the average age of the HGST drives being 66 months, (5.5 years) and still showing the lowest failure rate, with over 4200 such drives surviving, you can rest assured these numbers are far more believable than any MTBF rates published by the manufacturers. This is real world testing as opposed to computed estimates, which backed by bean-counter calculations of replacing failed retail drives with bill-of-materials cost drives carrying only a residual warranty.
Personally, I would expect poorer durability in a home or office computer simply due to power cycles. BackBlaze probably never turns theirs off, even to replace a drive. But I'm sure as hell not going to buy from the high-failure-rate brands even if my use case would be different then theirs.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.