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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @09:48AM (4 children)
It's immaterial to average user how many drives fail. Even to business, it's immaterial. It's only material to big players in storage and even then, it's almost immaterial.
If I'm a home user and I have 10 drives, it doesn't matter which drive I pick except for the length of warranty the manufacturer gives me. If the drive fails before warranty is over, at least I can get a replacement.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday January 29 2019, @10:34AM (1 child)
Never lost data then?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @07:04PM
Never did a backup despite having 9 spare drives.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday January 29 2019, @10:57AM
I wouldn't call it free tho. Last time this happened to me it was a Seagate drive. I had to download a little tool to generate some kind of report for them about the drive. Then they ok:ed that. Then I had to pay for the shipping to Holland, which was apparently the closest center they had. For that I would get a refurbished replacement drive. Refurbished, as in not new. I had a bit of a think and noted that I might as well just buy a new drive, there cost difference was minimal. So fuck them and their supposed replacement drives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @07:15AM
Except that that's a huge pain in the ass and a waste of time. How the hell is that immaterial, even assuming you can get the manufacturer to honor their warranty?