Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

Post by trowawee » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 6:29 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #42

trowawee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note to self: stay the hell away from Western Digital. Good lord, an 8.2% annualized failure rate? That's unbelievable. They have the first, second, and third worst failure rates on that chart.

A few years ago, you could have said the same for Seagate. Even worse, actually. Certain models had over 10% failure rate. Some WD models almost had HGST levels of relibility. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update...

Post by theandrewbailey » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 6:35 PM UTC

trowawee wrote: post #51

theandrewbailey wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago, you could have said the same for Seagate. Even worse, actually. Certain models had over 10% failure rate. Some WD models almost had HGST levels of relibility. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update...

Hmmm. Curious. I wonder if Seagate has improved their production somehow to avoid those failure rates, because even with those previous very high rates, they fare much better on the 2013-2016 total chart.

Post by theandrewbailey » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 6:45 PM UTC

fpp wrote: post #43

andy4blaze wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Backblaze Vault design mitigates that as the "raid array" is scattered across 20 different Storage Pods in twenty different racks. You'd need more than three racks to go down before you would be offline. Backup systems in place make that highly unlikely. Andy at Backblaze.

I'll see from your reports that you're migrating 1000s of 2TB drives to 8TB drives - what is actually happening to your old 2TB drives? Guess you are not throwing those away so what are you doing with them.

Post by kardos » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 6:53 PM UTC

dom0 wrote: post #40

pfarnsworth wrote: post #17

With hard drive size increasing so quickly but hard drive transfer speeds basically flat, I wonder if there are long-term implications for them with respect to recovery from backup and downtime. For example, if a whole rack goes down, and they are on 32TB drives in the future, for example, could it takes a week or more for their data to get online?

Well, uh, yes. No one really expects that rotational rust will get much faster, and in fact history shows that, compared to the increase in density, the increase in transfer rates are laughable at best. Between 1990 and today you are probably looking at a 20 000 times increase in density, yet transfer rates only increased around a factor of around 150-200. [In fact, from the early 1960 to today it's only a factor of…

Post by trowawee » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 6:57 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #53

trowawee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm. Curious. I wonder if Seagate has improved their production somehow to avoid those failure rates, because even with those previous very high rates, they fare much better on the 2013-2016 total chart.

They might have. But I also wonder if those drives were among the first after the 2011 Thailand floods, and if Seagate's factories were still a bit dirty after resuming production.