Hard Drive Reliability statistics from online backup company Backblaze

strawman

strawman

Fantastic insight! This is the kind of aggregate statistics the hard drive companies loathed would get out.

On the other hand, one might wonder if back blaze themselves are using hitachi drives at a discount...
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

Wait... so this thing is saying that within three years, my Seagate has a one-in-four chance of dying?

That's... disquieting.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
bhamv3 said:
Wait... so this thing is saying that within three years, my Seagate has a one-in-four chance of dying?

That's... disquieting.
Click to expand...
If it's any consolation, I have noticed that compared to other brands, Seagates tend to die slower once failure starts.. IE, they give you plenty of warning via performance hits/reboots/general irritation to get your files off the drive before they fail completely.
 
strawman

strawman

Chad Sexington said:
This is really interesting. I wonder why failure rates seem to go down so much for bigger hard drives?
Click to expand...
I wonder if the reality is that people with 4TB hard drives still only use a TB or two, and by not using all of the hard drive they are simply not running into problems as much as a 1TB HD user that's using the whole thing.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
I think it stems back to the taiwan floods which happened when 1-1.5 TB hard drives were the big sellers. Remember, there was flooding that killed the hard drive market for like a year, and companies (particularly seagate) had to scramble for alternative, perhaps slightly grayer, sources for their stuff. That was precisely when I started noticing dramatic increases in the number of seagates that were failing on me, compared to western digitals. However, since then, the manufacturing/supply has recovered for the most part and I think we're seeing a return to normalcy.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

These data have been available annually for a while now, but even they admit that since they only started keeping track so recently, they don't really have a lot of SSD data available.

...soooo you might want to check out this article (and the previous four), too.

--Patrick
 
strawman

strawman

My 64GB SSD was the reason for the demise of my computer I complained about dying a few months ago. It didn't just stop working, it prevented the computer from starting up. Bad, bad design.
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

GasBandit said:
I think it stems back to the taiwan floods which happened when 1-1.5 TB hard drives were the big sellers. Remember, there was flooding that killed the hard drive market for like a year, and companies (particularly seagate) had to scramble for alternative, perhaps slightly grayer, sources for their stuff. That was precisely when I started noticing dramatic increases in the number of seagates that were failing on me, compared to western digitals. However, since then, the manufacturing/supply has recovered for the most part and I think we're seeing a return to normalcy.
Click to expand...
As a Taiwanese person, I apologize on behalf of our climate.
 
strawman

strawman

I must not have read the original report thoroughly, because I was thinking that this data was from customer failures, not backblazes server drive failures.

That's too bad, because it really does decrease the value of the report.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

Some of his counterpoints aren't correct/fair, though.
I agree with most of his points, heck, I could've pointed them out from the beginning, but some are either irrelevant-if-true, or simply not true because of how he regards the data.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
As someone who will be building a new computer soon, this information is awesome! I am currently looking at a 1 TB WD as I already have one that works and I'll have 2 TB total.

Good stuff, Gas!
 
SpecialKO

SpecialKO

I might have missed it in a previous posting on the test, but have they said what they consider to be typical usage, to put the test results in context?
 
Eriol

Eriol

SpecialKO said:
I might have missed it in a previous posting on the test, but have they said what they consider to be typical usage, to put the test results in context?
Click to expand...
They have. In that article:
The last victim fell at 1.2PB, which is barely a speck in the rear-view mirror for our remaining subjects. The 840 Pro and a second HyperX 3K have now reached two freaking petabytes of writes. To put that figure into perspective, the SSDs in my main desktop have logged less than two terabytes of writes over the past couple years. At this rate, it'll take me a thousand years to reach that total.
Click to expand...
So you have no worries.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Obviously if your usage model writes more data than that (video editing, for instance) then your data usage will be higher, but to put it in perspective, keep in mind that 1TB is about equivalent to 200 DVDs.

--Patrick
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

So, you wished you could sift through all of Backblaze's trove of SMART data yourself to see if you could spot any undiscovered trends, or satisfy your morbid data curiosity?

Wish granted.

--Patrick
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

I know.

This is one of those ironic wishes, where you get exactly what you ask for, but not necessarily what you want...which is exactly what you should expect when you ask anything of a computer.

--Patrick
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Speaking of data loss, BB's Hard Drive Stats for Q1 2018 are finally out.

Big winners are still some of the Hitachi 4TB drives (Models HMS5C4040ALE640 & HMS5C4040BLE640), which have the lowest fail rate of any of the drives they report.

EDIT: Apparently there are others watching this data as well. The drives I mention above used to be available refurbished for $99, but now a quick check shows them going for $200-350ea. Maybe now we're seeing some sort of effect from BurstCoin miners?

--Patrick
 
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