Backblaze Publishes Hard Drive Stats for 2019: Failure rates on the rise
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heffeque
As always, HGST and Toshiba in general better values than Seagate.
EspHack
seagate always shows higher failure rates but their sample sizes are way bigger
fry178
For the 8TB Toshiba the explanation makes no sense. if the 12TB drives have identical cost per TB, the drives are Not the same price, e.g. 10$/TB means 80 VS 120, not sure how they coudnt get that right.
heffeque
Corrected: Seagate always shows higher failure rates even though their sample sizes are way bigger.
Seagate can't say it was a bad batch.
warezme
Seagate drives are trash. That's why I don't buy them even when they are the cheapest on sale. There is a reason for that. They are probably even under reporting their failure rates if I were to speculate.
fry178
except there's a difference between consumer and enterprise drives, which seem to perform better.
not that I would buy either...
0blivious
I have had a really bad run of Seagate drives this past 2 years. I cannot remember the last time one of my WD drives failed but I had 3 different Seagate 3TB drives and 1 Seagate 1.5 TB drive all fail (6-10 years old). I still bought a 2TB Seagate last month for my son's build. I'm a fool. 😛
KissSh0t
Why is there no Western Digital?
Alessio1989
Would be nice too see wd red vs ironwolf..
The Goose
There`s always a company that gets trashed, it used to be Western digital but there not on the list so its someone else, given that the Seagate 12tb has a drive count of 37,004 and a days count of over 12,000,000 they are going to have a higher failure rate.
Mundosold
That's not how statistics work. With this many samples the confidence level would be 98% that these are accurate failure rates within 0.2%.
And Hgst is Western Digital.
Hgsts WORST model failure rate is still better than Seagate BEST model failure rate.
Geek
I think you need to look closer at the correlation between drive days and the AFR.
I always take these statistics with a grain of salt. I think the best conclusion that you can draw, is even if a drive is prone to failure, the failure rates are still very low.
Also you cannot compare the conditions in a data center to those in a home PC.
If you want some really good info on how operating conditions affect drives take a look at this study from google.
JiveTurkey
Not sure what I can say here, but Seagate always puts out internal responses to these stats.
Personally, I like to see apples to apples how different consumer drives hold up under enterprise load. Sometimes you have a poorly written programs that do not use buffers well and the constant direct writes can just hammer the crap out of a kinetic hard drive.
Oranges to Oranges, consumer drives do power up and down a lot. Where enterprise drives rarely if ever get restarted. Alot of failures are actually just firmware lock ups and a restart would have recovered them.
anticupidon
Bought a HGST drive two years ago, and without even knowing that it was in BackBlaze's list of most reliable in it's category.
After the list was published, the price on that particular SKU skyrocketed.
Bought it at 120€ , now you are lucky to find it under 200€.
We are talking EU prices here, you guys over the pond you don't realise how easy you guys have it.
And yes, Toshiba and HGST drives have me the most pleasant experience, followed by defunct Samsung Spinpoint F1.
Western Digital are ok and reliable, by nemesis are Seagate hard drives.
But whatever is being said, Seagate hard drives are the easiest to repair and recover data from ( not helium ones) other brand are a hellish experience to even begin. Western Digital is a total PITA to recover data from ( USB connector instead of standard S-ATA)
heffeque
Check your statistics again taking into consideration that AFR comes from ANNUALLY. Your conclusion will no longer make sense ;-)
The data center conditions are the same for all brands and models.
I have read that a looong time ago (because that study is from 13 years ago). Although most things are still true today, technology and quality have evolved (for better or worse) over time, especially after more than a decade.
I'm pretty sure that Backblaze's engineers aren't aware of that. Please contact them to apply for a job as top senior engineer there. I'm sure they'll pay you top money for that kind of knowledge!
Andrew LB
I've got a few WD Black 7200 rpm drives from around a decade ago running 24/7 with zero issues. Also have a pair of the 74gb raptor drives in raid for longer than that. From my experience repairing computers over the past 20 years, the most common dead/dying drives I encounter are Toshiba 2.5" drives and seagate 2.5", followed by seagate 3.5". Every now and then i come across a WD blue drive that's failing. If Ive ever seen a WD black drive fail, its been so long that i can't recall.
fry178
remember the highest return rate with defective (as in store ships it back) were maxtor followed by seagates.
not that others didnt have trouble
(one customer lost all data with 4 WDs in raid, since he was smart enough to buy his drives from same brand/model, and since purchased together, also same batch),
but no other brand was as high as maxtor or seagate.
funny, cause a (higher IQ) friend of mine said, statistically it wouldnt matter, as globally you might have other shops not having any failing ones.
one year later he bought a 1TB ext seagate to use as backup in case the server dies/gets damaged etc.
had set it for weekly incremental backups (sub 10gb), and full backup every 4 weeks.
drive died after 6 weeks.
Tiny_Clanger
hdd life is a lottery, some people are just lucky
slyphnier
if u check those model listed in table, most (if not all) are enterprise-model HDDs
since WD purchase HGST, HGST drive lineup serve more to enterprise than consumer
till now, which seems WD really merge the branding into one
as far wd red and ironwolf... imo both similar
probably except u using NAS supported with "ironwolf-health-management IHM" , then using ironwolf give u better information about hdd health... but not really big-deal, basically its just auto-smart-check cmiiw
Aura89
That's simply not how that works.
If you want to find the correlation between the drives and how long they were used you'd have to divide the number of days by drive count.
For example, Seagates 37,004 drives and 12,721,076 drive days averages out to each drive working for 343 days of the year.
Compare that to HGSTs highest drive count of 12,746 drives and 4,674,986 and that averages out to each drive working for 366 days of the year (...not sure how it has 366 days rather then 365, 2019 was not a leap year, but whatever)
Effectively, equal to equal comparisons by drive useage would mean that the drive fail rate compared to Seagates would actually be lower (between those two drives anyways) by around 6.3%. And by your own statement, given that HGST drives were powered on longer, the HGST drives "should have higher fail rates", and that's simply, as is obvious from the data, not true.
As to "it use to be WD", it's pretty solidly been seagate for...what? 10? 15 years? They've gotten better since their 3TB fiasco, but they still seem to have a fail rate issue compared to their competitors
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/blog_seagate_status.png
