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Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

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Re: Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

#42

Post by theandrewbailey »

trowawee wrote: post #20
leejoramo wrote: post #8

How are people using Backblaze's excellent hard drive reliability reports in making purchasing decisions? For example when I search for HGST HMS5C4040ALE640 on Amazon I get a dealer selling old out of warrantee drives as new. https://www.amazon.com/HGST-MegaScale-HMS5C4040ALE640-Coolsp... I get similar results with many of the other drives listed and with other websites such as NewEgg.

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...

Re: Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

#43

Post by fpp »

andy4blaze wrote: post #26
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?

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.

Re: Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

#45

Post by andy4blaze »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #31
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 guess my question is more about the long term implications of transfer speeds increasing much slower than hard drives space. And if there's a hidden risk to downtime because all of a sudden, a full rack of 32 or even 64TB drive will take day(s) to transfer as opposed to an hour or so because transfer speeds are so slow.

I suppose if you had a single 32TB drive that went offline for say a week, and then once it came back online you'd have some type of pent up demand and a "slow" transfer speed. Storage systems in general spread the load across multiple devices so the effect of slow transfer speed is near zero in most backup and archiving applications and maybe more problematic in transactional applications.

Re: Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

#49

Post by trowawee »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #46
trowawee wrote: post #21

Looks like they're offline. Google cache link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DNdyZ1...

Backblaze always gives great stats with these. I upvoted the story before looking at it.

Agreed. I'm always interested in the results , even if their physical usage of the drives is miles above anything I'm ever going to do with a hard drive.
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