from the how-much-of-that-is-cat-videos? dept.
Backblaze has released its hard drive statistics for 2017.
Beginning in April 2013, Backblaze has recorded and saved daily hard drive statistics from the drives in our data centers. Each entry consists of the date, manufacturer, model, serial number, status (operational or failed), and all of the SMART attributes reported by that drive. As of the end of 2017, there are about 88 million entries totaling 23 GB of data. You can download this data from our website if you want to do your own research, but for starters here's what we found.
[...] For 2017 we added 25,746 new drives, and lost 6,442 drives to retirement for a net of 19,304 drives. When you look at storage space, we added 230 petabytes and retired 19 petabytes, netting us an additional 211 petabytes of storage in our data center in 2017.
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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: 3, Informative) by frojack on Saturday February 03 2018, @09:40PM (6 children)
The presentation of the charts is ripe for misinterpretation by those who won't read the caveats and I predict this, like so many other drive studies will be quoted far and wide and WRONG for years.
So I'll start first: ;-)
I'm surprised that even ONE drive failed after only 1255 drive days.
Just sayin...
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @10:19PM
Dancing. I'm feces dancing. Pinworm-infested liquid fecal matter dribbling out of my rotten rectum as I dance with my naked bootysnap. They're looking at me. All of them are looking at me. Eyes full of disgust. Disgust? They're disgusted because they know they're inferior to me. That's right: Your true power has been revealed! All of you are mere nothingness ultimatums compared to one such as I! Now vanish already and make way for this glorious feces-filled extravaganza!
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday February 03 2018, @10:26PM (3 children)
Above is about the closest thing to an endorsement as you will find in the article.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @10:29PM
I see. So you're jealous of my feces-covered existenceness.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! I just dumped in that silverware drawer containing your hopes & dreams. Wow... there's a single spot with no dump on it, so there's still hope for you! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Secret dump, secret dump, secret dump! It's... One With Dump! What a mythical concoction this is! Such a fuckin' thing!
The man continued with his parasitic feces dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @03:27AM (1 child)
Toshiba 4GB is pretty good, too. Given the statistics, their underlying failure rate could be just as low.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @03:30AM
I mean 4 TB. 😀
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Sunday February 04 2018, @03:57AM
Yeah. The stats on the link all mix together all the drives at different points of their lifespan. So new drives appear worse, and drives where all the questionable ones have already died off appear better. You can see this in the "by year" chart.
(Score: 2) by Techwolf on Sunday February 04 2018, @05:11PM
While this is going to be touted as a real world hard drive test, a datacenter and desktop are two different environments. One is temp control. Data center now a days run there server very hot to save on AC costs. My personal experience shows that if you keep a WD digital drive nice an cool with proper airflow over it, it will not fail. While if running hot like most desktop cases are, will fail early. Seagate is opposite, will still fail under cool conditions, but will last longer in hot conditions. Because of that, Seagate and other drives like it will seem to be a better drive with stats like that. While other drives have a much better failure rate under better conditions.