Backblaze Hard Drive Reliability Review for 2015

[Arthur]

Click the link to read the full details.

 

Source: Backblaze Blog

 

By the end of 2015, the Backblaze datacenter had 56,224 spinning hard drives containing customer data. These hard drives reside in 1,249 Backblaze Storage Pods. By comparison 2015 began with 39,690 drives running in 882 Storage Pods. We added 65 Petabytes of storage in 2015 give or take a Petabyte or two. Not only was 2015 a year of growth, it was also a year of drive upgrades and replacements. Let’s start with the current state of the hard drives in our datacenter as of the end of 2015 and then dig into the rest later on.

 

Hard Drive Statistics for 2015

The table below contains the statistics for the 18 different models of hard drives in our datacenter as of 31 December 2015. These are the hard drives used in our Storage Pods to store customer data. The Failure Rates and Confidence Intervals are cumulative from Q2 2013 through Q4 2015. The Drive Count is the number of drives reporting as operational on 31 December 2015.

 

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Drives by Manufacturer

The drives in the datacenter come from 4 manufacturers. The following chart shows the cumulative hard drive failure rates by manufacturer for all drives:

 

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This is quite interesting...

 

A relevant observation from our Operations team on the Seagate drives is that they generally signal their impending failure via their SMART stats. Since we monitor several SMART stats, we are often warned of trouble before a pending failure and can take appropriate action. Drive failures from the other manufacturers appear to be less predictable via SMART stats.

[NviGate_Systems]

I've always seen bad results with non standard drive sizes. I've seen it with 320GB, 640GB, 750GB and I don't doubt the 1.5TB. Time will tell with 6TB and 8TB drives. I think there are a few 5TB drives around too, though mostly consumer USB devices. Won't touch em. I do have 2 3 Year old HGST 4TB, no problems, though very seldom used.

[bald_pig]

Surprising, thought WD would have a better failure rate!