Hard Drive Test Data - Determining Failure Rates And More

[6Foot2]

Link: Hard Drive Test Data - Determining Failure Rates and More

 

...How You Can Use the Data

 

You can download and use this data for free for your own purpose, all we ask is three things 1) you cite Backblaze as the source if you use the data, 2) you accept that you are solely responsible for how you use the data, and 3) you do not sell this data to anyone, it is free...

[Arthur]

It would be really interesting to see what Backblaze's HDD reliability chart would look like once the result-skewing stats are removed or the charts organized differently.

 

Are there any statisticians or mathematicians on Edugeek that fancy a challenge?

[synaesthesia]

No, but we don't need Backblaze's data to tell us what we already know; Seagate drives are utter piles of cock.

[Arthur]

Seagate drives are utter piles of cock.

Backblaze still recommend Seagate drives though. The reliability of a particular HDD model is much more important than the brand since even Western Digital produces some lemons too.

 

www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive

 

All hard drives will eventually fail, but based on our environment if you are looking for good drive at a good value, it’s hard to beat the current crop of 4 TB drives from HGST and Seagate. As we get more data on the 6 TB drives, we'll let you know.

 

We're beginning the transition from using 4 TB to using 6 TB drives. Currently we have 270 of the Western Digital Red 6 TB drives. The failure rate is 3.1%, but there have been only 3 failures. The statistics give a 95% confidence that the failure rate is somewhere between 0.1% and 17.1%. We need to run the drives longer, and see more failures, before we can get a better number.

 

We have just 45 of the Seagate 6 TB SATA 3.5" drives, although more are on order. They've only been running a few months, and none have failed so far. When we have more drives, and some have failed, we can start to compute failure rates.

[synaesthesia]

Couldn't care less; the most failures we've had a several Seagates between 500gb and 2tb. The 1, 1.5 and 2tb drives we've had are utterly awful.

You're right though, it is often down to particular models. Quite a number of workstations we have still run on 250gb seagates/maxtors and are generally OK.

However, the failures put a huge dent in confidence with a particular manufacturer, and to add insult to injury they've not exactly been forthcoming with acknowledging any problems. That alone is worth making sure we don't go near them again. Luckily, spinning rust isn't high on our agenda for things to buy any more.