You can use default warranty information to figure out the lower bound on useful life. Companies price the value of the warranty into the product and perform statistical QA to ensure that 95%-99% of all products released will work correctly for the length of the standard warranty. Also added warranties aren't worth the cost. Just replace the product when it breaks.
How long do disk drives last?
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Re: How long do disk drives last?
#12Damn, my last two harddrives have failed in around 3 years exactly. Did I have bad luck or am I being too mean to them? My computer is on mostly all the time and is often reading files throughout the night (for slow uploads for example). Does it make a difference how often you read/write a drive or only the spun-up time? One died suddenly without any warning in the SMART data and the other got badblocks and started t…
The data presented in the article only makes sense if you buy a large quantity of hard drives; if you only have had a handful then you were just unlucky.
I suspect the reason why people do "burn in" tests on hard drives is to make drives that suffer from early failure ("infant mortality" as described in the article) fail early enough that you can RMA them with the manufacturer. Apart from that, I don't think there's much you can do to improve your chances.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#13I think the floods has probably been a factor in reduced reliability. It took forever for prices to come down to where they were and the manufacturers are probably cutting corners everywhere to save costs. Why ramp up factories when the tech itself is on the way out?
I think this is most evident in the reduced warranty periods compared to before when 5 years was quite normal.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#14It'd be very useful to have more detailed information about read/write volume and capacity, MTBF should vary a lot depending on those. Until then I'll keep being paranoid.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#15Do they plan on sharing any data on which vendors and models have the highest failure rates?
lol my money is on Seagate.. I thought it amusing how they rebadged their crap drives as Samsungs when they bought the name because of their very good rep in the sector.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#16Part of the problem is the move by manufacturers to have consumers basically burn-in test their products for them as cost reduction and shift the expense to retailers.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#17I wonder how many will die before they age out of usefulness. If you're still spinning 250Gb hard disks which are using the same power and space that a 4Tb drive could be using - it might not actually be economically sensible to keep running them. Certainly the old 9.1Gb SCSI disks that were so popular 10 years ago are well past be justifiable to give power to now.
That may be true for blackblaze.
But these drives will still be useful. What about, say, shipping them to ONGs located in Africa?
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#18Backblaze may not know because they are "a company that keeps more than 25,000 disk drives spinning all the time". After 3-5 years, you'd better have a back-up of a drive you choose to spin down. Every drive I've lost (in the last 10-15 years and ignoring two failed controllers subject to a close lightning strike) failed to start back up when I had powered the machine off for maintenance.
I've bought perhaps 50 drives in the past 20 years, and maybe 10 of them died, the others mostly becoming obsolescent. I only started taking serious logs about 6 years ago.
Drives have died for me both in 24/7 powered systems and through power cycles. Drives have reported intermittent failures for many months, but still lived for years without any actual data loss. The oldest drive I still have spinning is a 200G IDE containing the OS for my old OpenSolaris zfs NAS; must be getting on for 9 years.
I advise having a back-up of every drive you own, preferably two. I built a new NAS last week, 12x 4G drives in raidz2 configuration; with zfs snapshots, it fulfills 2 of the 3 requirements for backup (redundancy and versioning), while I use CrashPlan for cloud backup (distribution, the third requirement). Nice thing about CrashPlan is my PCs can back up to my NAS as well, so restores are nice and quick, pulling from the internet is a last resort.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#19I wonder how many will die before they age out of usefulness. If you're still spinning 250Gb hard disks which are using the same power and space that a 4Tb drive could be using - it might not actually be economically sensible to keep running them. Certainly the old 9.1Gb SCSI disks that were so popular 10 years ago are well past be justifiable to give power to now.
That may be true for blackblaze. But these drives will still be useful. What about, say, shipping them to ONGs located in Africa?
I suspect the overheads of collection, shipping and distribution would dwarf the savings from not buying the optimal price/GB drive du jour.
Hard drive space per dollar grows exponentially, and they're big weighty things. The window of time where it would be economical to reuse would be short, and value dubious.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#20I wonder how many will die before they age out of usefulness. If you're still spinning 250Gb hard disks which are using the same power and space that a 4Tb drive could be using - it might not actually be economically sensible to keep running them. Certainly the old 9.1Gb SCSI disks that were so popular 10 years ago are well past be justifiable to give power to now.
That may be true for blackblaze. But these drives will still be useful. What about, say, shipping them to ONGs located in Africa?
Even with the energy used for shipping them end-to-end?