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Cloud backup business Backblaze: Failure rates fell for high-capacity hard drives
Just 139 out of 10,000 12TB Seagate drives fail a year, and Western Digital's HGST brand has an even better rate of 51 in 10,000, according to cloud backup service provider Backblaze, which has 104,778 drives spinning in its data centre.
It's not an exhaustive study; the firm listed just four brands in its estate, with models ranging from older ones with 3TB of capacity to newer 12TB drives and some 14TB drives from Toshiba. However, it does provide some data points for the curious.
It has 31,146 Seagate 12TB disks and 1,278 HGST 12TB spinners. The backup firm claimed the best ever drives it purchased were 45 Toshiba 5TB units, none of which had failed. But of course the sample size of 45 is too small for a valid annualised failure rate (AFR).
[...] The next best is a Seagate 10TB drive with a 0.33 per cent AFR from a population of 1,210 drives. That means 33 out of a batch of 10,000 would fail each year.
Previously: Seagate Faces Lawsuit Over Defective Hard Drives
Disk Drive Failure Rates
Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2017
Backblaze Publishes Hard Drive Reliability Stats for Q1 of 2018
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:21AM (2 children)
TFA doesn't disuss load or read/write frequency - anyone know the duty cycle of a dedicated cloud bak up drive might be? I imagine far heavier than any home user.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Tuesday January 29 2019, @10:06AM
Backblaze has published their raw data [backblaze.com] including all S.M.A.R.T. statistics, so if you really want to know you could probably generate some report.
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by LAV8.ORg on Tuesday January 29 2019, @06:00PM
From what I recall, r/w load is of less significance than uptime, surprisingly enough. Also, one study showed hard drives last longer given operation above room temp.