sonofsanta Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 Far from conclusive, but from a decent sample size and real-world production data: Hard drive reliability study names names - The Tech Report This is my favourite graph of the (short) article: http://techreport.com/r.x/2014_1_20_Backblaze_names_names_in_hard_drive_reliability_study/survival.jpg Looks like I'll be avoiding Seagate then! I know this is one study on a small proportion of all the world's shipments on HDDs, but when there's often only pennies separating HDDs, I'll not take the risk, thanks.
synaesthesia Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 I'll let you have a guess what the drive is in bits from my other thread
CHR1S Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 (edited) Somewhat useful, but limited report. Its the amount of failures of particular drives in a particular set of circumstances at this particular company. (They mention its a high vibration environment) An interesting read nonetheless. These drives are designed to be energy-efficient, and spin down aggressively when not in use. In the Backblaze environment, they spin down frequently, and then spin right back up. We think that this causes a lot of wear on the drive Also as the quote above, drives being used outside of their operating envelope. Seagate Barracuda Green (ST1500DL003) 1.5TB 51 0.8 120.0% Also, how can a drive have a 120% failure rate? What Drives Is Backblaze Buying Now? We are focusing on 4TB drives for new pods. For these, our current favorite is the Seagate Desktop HDD.15 (ST4000DM000). We’ll have to keep an eye on them, though. Historically, Seagate drives have performed well at first, and then had higher failure rates later. So they slate Seagate and in the next section state they are their favourite drive to buy right now! Edited January 21, 2014 by CHR1S
zag Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 What's even more worrying is even the best hard disks, 1 in 20 are going to die after 24 months! *inserts standard SSDs are more reliable comment here*
sonofsanta Posted January 21, 2014 Author Posted January 21, 2014 (edited) Also as the quote above, drives being used outside of their operating envelope. To be fair, the line "These drives are designed to be energy-efficient, and spin down aggressively when not in use. In the Backblaze environment, they spin down frequently, and then spin right back up. We think that this causes a lot of wear on the drive." is taken from the section titled Excluded Drives with an opening statement of "Some drives just don’t work in the Backblaze environment. We have not included them in this study. It wouldn’t be fair to call a drive “bad” if it’s just not suited for the environment it’s put into." I can't see an explanation for the 120%; all I can think is that they have 51 in production at any one time, and have had to get 60 replaced under warranty i.e. the replacements have needed replacing. Small numbers there, though, so not a representative sample for that model. Edited January 21, 2014 by sonofsanta 1
CHR1S Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 (edited) And thats what I get for skim reading and cherry picking! But I still stand by the point of the comment, this isnt day to day use by any stretch of the imagination. Edited January 21, 2014 by CHR1S 1
sparkeh Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 Well, this concerns me greatly: Backblaze says the Seagate drives are also more prone to dropping out of RAID arrays prematurely. The company uses consumer-grade drives that aren't designed explicitly for RAID environments, of course So, these figures are based on operating drives out of their normal operating parameters? What we can conclude then is that the Seagate are the worst at operating out of their normal environments and Hitachi the best. I would be more interested in figures showing failure rates of drives in their proper environments.
synaesthesia Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 I must admit the majority of failures in school are Seagate/Maxtor (same thing, identical drives, different sticker for obvious reasons)
difinity Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 Seagate used to offer 3 years as standard on their drives. Now it's only 1, i guess they know their product isn't as good as it used to be. Their "reconditioned" drives they send as replacement are also garbage as per the article.
SHimmer45 Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 if your "forcing consumer based drives" into a different environment then your going to bump the failure rates surely? i always assumed this is why you paid more for the enterprise type drives like the WD RE series as these had higher MTBF ratings but backblaze is not your standard environment..
difinity Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 @CHR1S, I'm guessing the 120% indicates some have failed more than once.
CHR1S Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 @CHR1S, I'm guessing the 120% indicates some have failed more than once. That was my thinking too.
Oaktech Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 We are seeing the batch of 8 year old WD 40gb drives beginning to perform the click of death, and deskstar (deathstar) drives expire with no warning what so ever.
rich_tech Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 Thats not much to go by comparative to your own experiences I think, mine tend to show the opposite in terms of reliability, from my work and personal, one batch of stones here from 2009 has good old Hitachi Deathstars in them that are slowly being replaced due to disk deaths and the good old mechanical clanking of death and pretty much any Western Digital disk I have ever had has about 4/5 years of life before suddenly developing read errors and/or going bang, whereas I have yet to have a Seagate go bang on me, only ones replaced here have been lowly 40gb ones in old machines and their still going.
Arthur Posted January 22, 2014 Posted January 22, 2014 (edited) What Hard Drive Should I Buy? « Backblaze ^ The Seagate drives with the 25.4% failure rate are the infamous 7200.11 HDDs. Backblaze didn't mention this in their blog. Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives failing « The Inquirer / Barracuda 7200.11 firmware: What we know « Seagate Forums Seagate's flagship desktop Barracuda 7200.11 drives, in particular the 1TB (ST31000340AS) units, are failing at an alarming rate and prompting outrage from their faithful customers. A new self-bricking feature apparently resides in faulty firmware microcode which will rear its ugly head sometime at boot detection. Essentially the drive will be working as normal for a while, then - out of the blue - it'll brick itself to death. The next time you reboot your computer the drive will simply lock itself up as a failsafe and won't be detected by the BIOS. In other words, there's power, spin-up, but no detection to enable booting. Weren't the Barracuda Green drives more or less rebadged 'LP' drives with 4k sectors? It's strange to see such a large difference between the two models in terms of the annual failure rate. Edited January 22, 2014 by Arthur
Arthur Posted January 22, 2014 Posted January 22, 2014 Seagate used to offer 3 years as standard on their drives. Now it's only 1 The warranty differs depending upon which model you buy. Seagate's Desktop SSHDs have a two year warranty for example. www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/12/16/seagate_cutting_warranties We are seeing the batch of 8 year old WD 40GB drives beginning to perform the click of death Eight year old HDDs are so painfully slow you would probably want to replace them even if they didn't fail.
sparkeh Posted January 22, 2014 Posted January 22, 2014 Thats not much to go by comparative to your own experiences I think, mine tend to show the opposite in terms of reliability, from my work and personal, one batch of stones here from 2009 has good old Hitachi Deathstars in them that are slowly being replaced due to disk deaths and the good old mechanical clanking of death and pretty much any Western Digital disk I have ever had has about 4/5 years of life before suddenly developing read errors and/or going bang, whereas I have yet to have a Seagate go bang on me, only ones replaced here have been lowly 40gb ones in old machines and their still going. Similar here really. When we first got one of our HP servers I was replacing failed WD disks at the rate of one per fortnight. HP support told me that they were seeing this across lots of customers and had swapped to Seagate. I replaced entire RAID array with Seagate and those original disks are still happily going along a few years later. Hmm tempting fate there *goes to check RAID health*.
localzuk Posted January 22, 2014 Posted January 22, 2014 So they slate Seagate and in the next section state they are their favourite drive to buy right now! Totally understandable really - its a cost benefit analysis. In an enterprise like Backblaze, so long as you get a couple of years out of them you're making plenty of money. Seagate drives are usually a good amount cheaper than the competition so it works for them. Here, I now specify Hitachi when buying drives anyway, based on personal experience and evidence from other discussions and articles. Followed by WD. Seagate just seem to have a bad habit of dying on us.
SYNACK Posted January 22, 2014 Posted January 22, 2014 Excrement, I just got shipped one of these for my own personal pc build, turns out there are two types under the same model number, the two platter one which is decent and 30% faster and the three platter which is slow and unreliable, trouble is there is no way to tell other than weight now they have obscured the serial numbers. Apparently the 2 platter ones are about 500g and the 3 platter ones are about 600g. Amazon.com: niels' review of Seagate Barracuda 2 TB HDD SATA 6 Gb/s NCQ... Having just got a 600g drive I am sending it back unopened, cant trust WD drives due to my experiences in schools so looks like I am getting Hitachi if I can even source them here.
Arthur Posted January 22, 2014 Posted January 22, 2014 so looks like I am getting Hitachi if I can even source them here. Can you get 3.5" Toshiba HDDs in New Zealand? www.sdd.toshiba.com.tw/english/products/overview.aspx?ccid=14
SYNACK Posted January 23, 2014 Posted January 23, 2014 For an extra 75% on top yes, did a little research as I managed to return it, as far as we can tell the entire batch shipped to NZ were the dodgy ones, there were no two platter ones at the distributors at all. Ended up getting A WD Green 2TB despite my massive mistrust of them as the only other stuff in the price range was Seagate which I had not checked out. Hitachi stuff was twice the cost for the same space so I decided against them.
Arthur Posted January 25, 2014 Posted January 25, 2014 Dispelling Backblaze's HDD Reliability Myth - The Real Story Covered « TweakTown ^ Basically what @CHR1S said.
Arthur Posted January 25, 2014 Posted January 25, 2014 (edited) For an extra 75% on top yes [...] Hitachi stuff was twice the cost for the same space so I decided against them. It sounds like you have to pay through the nose for everything in NZ. I thought "Rip Off Britain" was bad enough as it is. Edited January 25, 2014 by Arthur 1
sonofsanta Posted May 12, 2014 Author Posted May 12, 2014 Another report from the same company, so take with the same pinch of salt/caveats as the above: Backblaze Blog » Hard Drive Temperature – Does It Matter? Overall, there is not a correlation between operating temperature and failure rates. The one exception is the Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB drives, which fail slightly more when they run warmer. As long as you run drives well within their allowed range of operating temperatures, keeping them cooler doesn’t matter.
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