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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: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Friday November 18 2016, @10:28PM
slamming them hard 24/7 in a role that they were never intended to do
I have no reason to think this is any different than my drives in my Home server of a typical small business server.
What do all of these have in common:
Such machines are never turned off. (This extends the life of drives - power up is way harder than constant spin).
They run 24/7, but each is probably worked about the same amount, because people sleep.
The vast majority of sectors are written once, or a very few times. Write once Read mostly.
The use case isn't all that different. And the "SLAMMING" is mostly in your imagination.
Also your main tenant, that hard use is no measure of durability for light use, has been disprove in just about every industry it been tested. Which, in the physical world is just about everything. Including cars.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday November 19 2016, @01:04AM
Sorry but they are SLAMMING the drives as you don't buy assloads of storage if you aren't using assloads of storage! Know how much space is typically free on your average desktop PC? I can tell you, its 60%, that means nearly half of the drive has never been written to and the heads aren't having to traverse the whole drive equaling less wear on the motor, do you know how much free space is on these drives? Considering how many drives they are buying my guess is not much.
And again look at their drive cages, they have a lot of active cooling...how many fans do you see blowing on the HDD in your typical Dell or HP? Again I can answer that question, the answer is NONE, no fans are blowing on the HDD of your typical mid tower, they have a CPU fan and a rear exhaust fan and that is it.
So sure it'll help you if you are building servers or NAS, that was my point, just as taking those small cars and running them for a 10,000 off road rally will tell you which car to buy if you want to run a 10k off road rally, but that isn't gonna tell the person who just wants a small car to go back and forth to work each day which one to buy, the data just isn't relevant.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2016, @03:56AM
You friendly neighborhood word Nazi here.
"your main tenant" > This really confused me for a few seconds, and had me wondering what do people living at GP's house have to do with this, maybe they're using his servers?
You probably meant "tenet [dictionary.com]".
The word tenet , defined here, should not be hard to pronounce. For speakers of American English, say the number ten, then add the pronoun it , and you have tenet , pronounced (ten ʹ it). Unfortunately, there is a similar-looking and similar-sounding word in English that is much more common—the word tenant , meaning someone who rents and occupies an apartment, office, etc. This word is pronounced (ten ʹ ənt), and its pronunciation is frequently used in error by people who intend to say tenet . Because both words involve sequences of the same letters t and n —both of which are pronounced with the tongue in the same place, touching the upper palate—it is easy for the extra n of the more common word tenant to creep into the pronunciation of tenet . With care, one can learn to pronounce these two words differently and appropriately.
Back on-topic, there may be some to what GP says about different use-cases, but the results could swing either way. I'd also say that the very smooth and clearly delineated slopes of the graphs suggest that data is very representative :)
In my particular use-case, a desktop tower with several HDDs, ~95% full on average (whenever I run a new simulation, I have to find some old data that I don't need to analyze anymore so it can be discarded...), this data can be very helpful. Thanks to BackBlaze for publishing it and the submitter and editors for pushing it to SN! It's been a while since I last bought an HDD, so I forgot about this invaluable information :)