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How long do disk drives last?

blog.backblaze.com

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Re: How long do disk drives last?

#81

Post by nisa »

WatchDog wrote: post #2

Do they plan on sharing any data on which vendors and models have the highest failure rates?

Backblaze wrote about it here (2011): http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v... and here (2013): http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibration...

We are constantly looking at new hard drives, evaluating them for reliability and power consumption. The Hitachi 3TB drive (Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630) is our current favorite for both its low power demand and astounding reliability. The Western Digital and Seagate equivalents we tested saw much higher rates of popping out of RAID arrays and drive failure. Even the Western Digital Enterprise Hard Drives had the same high failure rates. The Hitachi drives, on the other hand, perform wonderfully.

In the second article they say that WD-RED are 2nd in reliability (WD-RED did not exist 2011). I'm happy that I've got a cheap Hitachi Ultrastar. But who knows.

As a personal anecdote: WD-Green failure rates are huge here. 24/7 Desktop machines, 240 drives. I've replaced in last 12 month at least 20 drives.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#82

Post by wazoox »

There are extremely large difference in reliability between different drives makes and models. Here are a couple of numbers (we're building storage servers, running 24/24 in various environments):

* my company installed about 4500 Seagate Barracuda ES2 (500 GB, 750 GB and mostly 1TB) between 2008 and 2010. These drives are utter crap, in 5 years we got about 1500 failures, much worse than the previous generation (250 GB to 750 GB Barracuda ES).

* After replacing several hundred drives, we decided to switch boats in 2010 and went with Hitachi (nowadays HGST). Of the roughly 3000 Hitachi/HGST drive used in the past 3 years, we had about 20 failures. Only one of the 200 Hitachi drives shipped between 2007 and 2009 failed. Most of the failed drives were 3 TB drives, ergo the 3 TB HGST HUA drives are less reliable than the 2 TB, themselves less reliable than the 1 TB model (which is by all measure, absolutely rock solid).

* Of the few WD drives we installed, we replaced about 10% in the past 3 years. Not exactly impressive, but not significant either.

* We replaced a number of Seagate Barracudas with Constellations, and these seem to be reliable so far, however the numbers aren't significant enough (only about 120 used in the past 2 years).

* About SSDs: SSDs are quite a hit and miss game. We started back in 2008 with M-Tron (now dead). M-Tron drives were horribly expensive, but my main compilation server still run on a bunch of these. Of all the M-Tron SSD we had (from 16 GB to 128 GB), none failed ever. There are 5 years old now, and still fast.

We've tried some other brands: Intel, SuperTalent... Some SuperTalent SSDs had terrible firmware, and the drives would crash under heavy load! They disappeared from the bus when stressed, but come back OK after a power cycle. Oh my...

So far unfortunately SSDs seem to be about as reliable as spinning rust. Latest generations fare better, and may actually best current hard drives ( we'll see in a few years how they retrospectively do).

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#83

Post by nisa »

jws wrote: post #58
pedrocr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why avoid the green drives? I assumed those were less power hungry and spinning slower so more reliable. I've been ordering them for RAID5 arrays and not had too many issues yet.

Greens have had problems with aggressive head parking. If you have an idle set of them you can go through their design limit of head parks in a couple of months and start to get failures shortly after. Done that. Check your S.M.A.R.T data. Look at the head park number. (Load cycles I think it is called, can't look it up now). If it is a six digit number, you are in trouble. For a server you want if to be in the same…

As someone who inherited 240 24/7 running WD-Greens: http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/ works fine but disabling the timer has negative performance impact. 3000 seconds is fine through. But you need a complete powercycle before the changes take effect. No more parking. Does make a difference in longevity in my not very scientific opinion.

I can second the 200> bad blocks. Sometimes they still work fine after using badblocks -w a few times on them and raising the timer.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#84

Post by barrkel »

mikevm wrote: post #68
barrkel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The one thing to know about cheap consumer cloud backup solutions like CrashPlan and Backblaze is that they only have one copy of your data. So if their RAID array where your data is stored dies and cannot be rebuilt, it's all gone. You can Google for a few disaster stories about both companies.

Like I said, they are only one third of my backup strategy. My house burning down, or someone breaking in and going into my attic to steal my 30kg 4U server, should be the only two realistic scenarios in which I will need to rely on CrashPlan.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#85

Post by mrgriscom »

skriticos2 wrote: post #46
alfor wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could not believe the price they have to pay for computer. It is easily 3x, 4x the price we pay for the same hardware. And I they do need computer. But, it is possible that the logistic/shipping is more expensive than the production of new hardware. Also, cheaper more energy efficient hardware could be more cost effective. source: A friend of mine worked for ong in Burkina Faso

I do believe you. It's economics of scale: they don't have it. While most of the western world has huge fright ship docks that can load/unload and ship relatively price efficient, Africa does not. This means, the primary means to ship stuff there is via airplane, which is notoriously weight constrained, which in turn makes shipping bulk goods expensive. This makes shipping newer, lighter tech even more cost effective…

I think a lot of that price is actually import duties.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#86

Post by driverdan »

gambiting wrote: post #26
maratd wrote: post #9

It depends on the warranty period of the drive. Your hard drive manufacturer knows precisely how long the drive will last and sets their warranty period to expire right before your drive gives up the ghost.

Yeah, if that was true that would be completely against EU regulations,so you could sue manufacturers and win millions. So if you have any proof that they are doing that, you are practically a millionaire, I don't know why are you not on your way to the court yet.

How so? That is how warrantees work. They're designed to protect you against premature failure. Unless it's a necessary competitive advantage no company is going to warrantee something past its expected lifetime. And in that case it's going to be included in the price.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#87

Post by sp332 »

leeoniya wrote: post #75
xeroxmalf wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The RED drives you are refering to actually have some of the worst reviews around compared to even normal consumer drives. (Source: newegg reviews you mentioned)

i'm not sure where you're getting that info: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236... http://www.amazon.com/WD-Red-NAS-Hard-Drive/dp/B008JJLZ7G been running 3x of these in a raid-5 NAS, no issues so far (not that it's any kind of indicator on a system which idles as a backup all day)

About half of the Newegg reviews are 3-eggs or lower. And even some of the 5-egg reviews mention dead drives! They only got 5 eggs because of Newegg's easy return policy. The drives are clearly unreliable.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#88

Post by dmourati »

Ugh. Backblaze is one of those companies with an extraordinarily poor design that they flout and "open source" as if anyone would follow their lead. Take a look at the physical design of their system and combine that with the published data. Consider that to remove any harddrive from their setup requires physically removing a 4u rackmount storage pod from the rack. http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...

Also, no hardware raid, battery, or cap.

Source: worked at Eye-Fi, built 2PB storage

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#89

Post by DanBC »

outworlder wrote: post #17
brongondwana wrote: post #10

I 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?

Here's a tv programme about the e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Accra, Ghana. It's probably on the Internet somewhere. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sch78)

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#90

Post by wmf »

mikevm wrote: post #68
barrkel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The one thing to know about cheap consumer cloud backup solutions like CrashPlan and Backblaze is that they only have one copy of your data. So if their RAID array where your data is stored dies and cannot be rebuilt, it's all gone. You can Google for a few disaster stories about both companies.

How many levels of backups for your backups do you need?
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