Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014

At Backblaze we now have 34,881 drives and store over 100 petabytes of data. We continually track how our disk drives are doing, which ones are reliable, and which ones need to be replaced.

I did a blog post back in January, called “What Hard Drive Should I Buy?” It covered the reliability of each of the drive models that we use. This month I’m updating those numbers and sharing some surprising new findings.

Reliability of Hard Drive Brands

Losing a disk drive at Backblaze is not a big deal. Every file we back up is replicated across multiple drives in the data center. When a drive fails, it is promptly replaced, and its data is restored. Even so, we still try to avoid failing drives, because replacing them costs money.

We carefully track which drives are doing well and which are not, to help us when selecting new drives to buy.

The good news is that the chart today looks a lot like the one from January, and that most of the drives are continuing to perform well. It’s nice when things are stable.

The surprising (and bad) news is that Seagate 3.0TB drives are failing a lot more, with their failure rate jumping from 9% to 15%. The Western Digital 3TB drives have also failed more, with their rate going up from 4% to 7%.

In the chart below, the grey bars are the failure rates up through the end of 2013, and the colored bars are the failure rates including all of the data up through the end of June, 2014.

Read more...

 

[CountMike]

I have some (some my call it strange) experience with dead HDDs. A good friend of mine collects magnets from dead and almost dead HDDs. Last few years he collected and we took apart hundreds of them so I head a unique chance of doing testing and postmortem on them. I have seen some trends like: the newer they are, more dead ones, the larger they are again higher failure rate. I can's swear to that but I think I have seen large number of Seagate drives dead from mechanical failure and WDs from electronics failure. Large number of Maxtor drives were still in operational order although way too outdated because of size. Now I'm sorry I didn't keep tab on shape of the drives I took apart and made a list of the causes they died from.
Hitachi ones I have seen just few but that could be that they are on a bit expensive side for local financial conditions although they are pretty reliable anyway.
I, personally have good experience with WD drives, even with much maligned "Green" ones. Not one of them was bought new and I have 2 in this machine, one 750 GB in 100% shape and a 350GB in 50% shape and never had any problems with them. Half a dozen are for keeping backups and misc. stuff on and are being connected thru USB interface as need arises.

 

[TONSCHUH]

Thanks for sharing !

Yeah, Maxtor's seemed to be undestroyable back then. In the early days I hated Seagate-HDD's, because some of them didn't even last 6-9 month.