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Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

backblaze.com

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Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

#101

Post by larrys »

atYevP wrote: post #91
larrys wrote: post #69

Question for the OP here (or for anyone else). Do you burn in new drives before using? I typically will take any new drive and do some type of stress test [1] on it for 18 to 24 hours to see if it fails with that initial constant use. [1] Constant reformatting for example writing 0's to the entire disk 7 times etc.

Yev from Backblaze here -> Yes, we do burn in the drives before deploying them. So the drives in the study are ones that have at least made it past that state.

Would be interesting to see a post on what your burn-in procedure is.

Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

#102

Post by benjaminpv »

aluhut wrote: post #41
emodendroket wrote: post #21

How times have changed; Seagate used to be (or at least have the reputation of being) the most reliable and Hitachi the least.

I'm so ashamed right now. I've been recommending Seagates to everybody who asked for years without updating my fundaments...

Don't be ashamed: for a pretty long time Seagates really were very reliable, the 7200.9 and 10 series were a staple in my systems throughout the last couple years. Seagates also used to have a 5 year warranty period. I'm actually thankful that the Seagates I've bought more recently tend to suffer from crib death: better it dies immediately rather than die once I've put my trust in it.

As others have said though, these things tend to go in cycles. One manu. gets a bunch of bum drives, people react and they start cracking the whip on QC. I think it's also a product of what we're asking of our drives today: SSDs are eating away at the low end so their only recourse is to pack more and more data into smaller and smaller spaces leading to a greater reliance on error correction.

I will say though, the BackBlaze report led me to try out HGST drives for the first time and I've been overwhelmingly satisfied with them.

That said, will that trend continue? I guess we'll see when the 2015 report comes out.

Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

#103

Post by bronson »

rane wrote: post #96
sounds wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You definitely don't want to use drives from the same manufacturing run (batch) on the same array, since they are the most likely to fail all at the same time. Second to that, you probably don't want to go single-source for your drives -- maybe use Hitachi with a mix of WD.

> Second to that, you probably don't want to go single-source for your drives -- maybe use Hitachi with a mix of WD. Can you explain why not?

Because then a single firmware bug could wipe you out. Once the drives all hit 4500 hours or 700 bad blocks or some other trigger, they die. It's happened before.

Could also be caused by bad grease, or shoddy bearings, or pretty much anything.

There is security in diversity.

Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

#104

Post by larrys »

spindritf wrote: post #82
larrys wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They're never replaced because regular consumers statistically don't ask for replacement and simply eat the loss?" There is another paradox as well. Some people won't ask for replacement because assuming you have to send in the bricked drive there is the chance that someone might get at your data somehow. What about that? (It's why I would never send in a drive that has failed.) [1] [1] My assumption is that I would…

I encrypt my drives anyway. If they can reanimate the drive and crack the encryption, well, they deserve to see the data.

Question (not a statement). Doesn't encrypting the drive also prevent you from recovering some of the information on the disk by way of drive recovery utilities?

So for example you might want to encrypt something super sensitive (which I do) but decide to not encrypt something less sensitive (say photos or perhaps a wiki with notes or letters to your grandma or wife or sig other).

Point being that if the drive isn't encrypted you might be able to get at some of that data. (If you need to). If you've encrypted the drive then can you still do that?

Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

#105

Post by rblatz »

VLM wrote: post #15
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #2

Biggest takeaway was at the end, with the "enterprise" drives being slightly less reliable than the consumer ones at half the cost.

And thats whats weird, who is the audience for the article? I know what enterprise drive means and I know the author is smart and knows what it means, so why the weird implications in the article that have nothing to do with "enterprise"? For those not "in the know" the hardware is the same, but desktop firmware drives will sit there for 10 seconds or whatever it is beating the drive when there's a read (or write) fa…

They do have WD Red drives in the comparison which aren't enterprise drives, but they also have the fail fast feature, I believe it is called TLER.

Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

#106

Post by cjensen »

andrewaylett wrote: post #92
cjensen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a few hundred drives, our anecdata is that failure over time on SSDs is generally related to drive endurance. Make sure you use a SMART utility which can read (and translate to English) the current net usage of the drive. Throw them away when you get to 100% usage. I recently examined a set of Crucial m4s which were at 130% of usage. There was no lost data, but write bandwidth was hilariously bad (around 10-20M…

It sounds like you might not have TRIM enabled? Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by 'usage'?

I'm talking about the "endurance" spec. Because Flash Memory can only be erased a finite number of times[1], SSD manufacturers specify the drive's endurance -- defined as the number of bytes which can be written to the SSD over its lifetime.

The SSDs helpfully keep track of how many bytes you've written and report that in the SMART info. For example, on my Windows dev system, HDD Guardian reports that I've used up 42% of my SSDs endurance (it's a Crucial m4 512GB). So by "usage", I mean the percentage of the endurance which has been burned.

[1] Each block of flash memory must be erased before it can be written. Each time you erase it, it "uses it up" a bit and will be harder to erase next time. So each time, the SSD controller is forced to erase it with just a bit more voltage. As the blocks become harder to erase, it takes more time to erase them and the SSD write bandwidth decreases.

Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

#107

Post by makmanalp »

Anyone have any reliability information on hitachi's new NAS drive series? They're supposed to build on the 7k3000 etc, but specifically tailored for NAS / raid situations, like WD reds. One major difference is that they're 7200 rpm instead of 5400 which is most non-high-end NAS drives.

Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

#108

Post by arb99 »

Very off topic, but their html is wrong:

"https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update... src='https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/bl... alt='Hard Drive Failure Rates by Model' width='560px' border='0' />"

should be "width='560'" not "width='560px'"

Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

#109

Post by wmf »

acdha wrote: post #93
sliverstorm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe reliability has ever necessarily been an "enterprise" feature. The concrete features I understand "enterprise" drives as having are: 1) firmware is built with RAID in mind. This might sound weird, but consumer drives are more likely to have problems with RAID, just because they aren't designed for it. See, for example, the first WD Green drives crashing RAID clusters because some timeout was too high.…

At every sales-pitch I've ever attended, the enterprise vendors mention “reliability” about every other word – the message that your boss will fire you for taking risks unless you buy their hardware is communicated with the subtlety of a solar eclipse. As for the RAID point, you'd very much want to find real data for that. I've heard similar folklore but have also heard plenty of lost data stories from enterprise dis…

Being optimized for RAID basically means TLER and possibly never spinning down.

Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

#110

Post by spindritf »

larrys wrote: post #104
spindritf wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encrypt my drives anyway. If they can reanimate the drive and crack the encryption, well, they deserve to see the data.

Question (not a statement). Doesn't encrypting the drive also prevent you from recovering some of the information on the disk by way of drive recovery utilities? So for example you might want to encrypt something super sensitive (which I do) but decide to not encrypt something less sensitive (say photos or perhaps a wiki with notes or letters to your grandma or wife or sig other). Point being that if the drive isn't…

Yes, the data will probably be completely irrecoverable from an encrypted drive. However, instead of hoping that you will be able to recover data from a broken drive, back it up.

I strongly recommend Tarsnap[1] for that. All your data is encrypted before it leaves your machine, it is run by our very own 'cperciva, and the key used for encryption (which you need to store securely somewhere, like your parents' house or a bank) can even be printed so hard to destroy accidentally.

The key itself can be encrypted, too. You can use the same password you use to encrypt the drive and now you safely and securely store all your data in such a way that only you can ever access it by remembering a single, longer phrase.

(Although to be fair, another backup would probably be a good idea if the data is really important. Maybe another encrypted hard drive kept at work.)

[1] https://www.tarsnap.com/

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