Wednesday, May 13th 2020
Backblaze Releases Hard Drive Stats for Q1 2020 - Seagate Worst Performer
As of March 31, 2020, Backblaze had 132,339 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across four data centers. Of that number, there were 2,380 boot drives and 129,959 data drives. This review looks at the Q1 2020 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers and provides a handful of insights and observations along the way. In addition, near the end of the post, we review a few 2019 predictions we posed a year ago. As always, we look forward to your comments.
Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q1 2020
At the end of Q1 2020, Backblaze was using 129,959 hard drives to store customer data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drives that were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 60 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 129,764 hard drives. The table below covers what happened in Q1 2020.
Notes and Observations
The Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) for Q1 2020 was 1.07%. That is the lowest AFR for any quarter since we started keeping track in 2013. In addition, the Q1 2020 AFR is significantly lower than the Q1 2019 AFR which was 1.56%.
During this quarter 4 (four) drive models, from 3 (three) manufacturers, had 0 (zero) drive failures. None of the Toshiba 4 TB and Seagate 16 TB drives failed in Q1, but both drives had less than 10,000 drive days during the quarter. As a consequence, the AFR can range widely from a small change in drive failures. For example, if just one Seagate 16 TB drive had failed, the AFR would be 7.25% for the quarter. Similarly, the Toshiba 4 TB drive AFR would be 4.05% with just one failure in the quarter.
On the contrary, both of the HGST drives with 0 (zero) failures in the quarter have a reasonable number of drive days, so the AFR is less volatile. If the 8 TB model had 1 (one) failure in the quarter, the AFR would only be 0.40% and the 12 TB model would have an AFR of just 0.26% with 1 (one) failure for the quarter. In both cases, the 0% AFR for the quarter is impressive.
There were 195 drives (129,959 minus 129,764) that were not included in the list above because they were used as testing drives or we did not have at least 60 drives of a given model. For example, we have: 20 Toshiba 16 TB drives (model: MG08ACA16TA), 20 HGST 10 TB drives (model: HUH721010ALE600), and 20 Toshiba 8 TB drives (model: HDWF180). When we report quarterly, yearly, or lifetime drive statistics, those models with less than 60 drives are not included in the calculations or graphs. We use 60 drives as a minimum as there are 60 drives in all newly deployed Storage Pods.
Lifetime Hard Drive Stats
The table below shows the lifetime failure rates for the hard drive models we had in service as of March 31, 2020. The reporting period is from April 2013 through December 31, 2019. All of the drives listed were installed during this timeframe.
Source:
Backblaze
Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q1 2020
At the end of Q1 2020, Backblaze was using 129,959 hard drives to store customer data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drives that were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 60 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 129,764 hard drives. The table below covers what happened in Q1 2020.
The Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) for Q1 2020 was 1.07%. That is the lowest AFR for any quarter since we started keeping track in 2013. In addition, the Q1 2020 AFR is significantly lower than the Q1 2019 AFR which was 1.56%.
During this quarter 4 (four) drive models, from 3 (three) manufacturers, had 0 (zero) drive failures. None of the Toshiba 4 TB and Seagate 16 TB drives failed in Q1, but both drives had less than 10,000 drive days during the quarter. As a consequence, the AFR can range widely from a small change in drive failures. For example, if just one Seagate 16 TB drive had failed, the AFR would be 7.25% for the quarter. Similarly, the Toshiba 4 TB drive AFR would be 4.05% with just one failure in the quarter.
On the contrary, both of the HGST drives with 0 (zero) failures in the quarter have a reasonable number of drive days, so the AFR is less volatile. If the 8 TB model had 1 (one) failure in the quarter, the AFR would only be 0.40% and the 12 TB model would have an AFR of just 0.26% with 1 (one) failure for the quarter. In both cases, the 0% AFR for the quarter is impressive.
There were 195 drives (129,959 minus 129,764) that were not included in the list above because they were used as testing drives or we did not have at least 60 drives of a given model. For example, we have: 20 Toshiba 16 TB drives (model: MG08ACA16TA), 20 HGST 10 TB drives (model: HUH721010ALE600), and 20 Toshiba 8 TB drives (model: HDWF180). When we report quarterly, yearly, or lifetime drive statistics, those models with less than 60 drives are not included in the calculations or graphs. We use 60 drives as a minimum as there are 60 drives in all newly deployed Storage Pods.
Lifetime Hard Drive Stats
The table below shows the lifetime failure rates for the hard drive models we had in service as of March 31, 2020. The reporting period is from April 2013 through December 31, 2019. All of the drives listed were installed during this timeframe.
32 Comments on Backblaze Releases Hard Drive Stats for Q1 2020 - Seagate Worst Performer
Orone could just see th sheer amount of horror stories on the internet and see that Seagate are nkt generally knkwn for reliability, hence the recommendation of many people to stay away from them.
My experience personally is quite horrible when talking Seagate in SOHO segment.
It's all about the model, not the brand. My current home storage systems have WD, HGST, and Seagate.
It always comes down to personal experience I guess ...
WD Green are probably not the best WD ever made, yet I still have 4x WD Green 3TB running in RAID10 in my old NAS, with headparking disabled. Closing in on 10 years with 24/7 usage, not a single issue. Got them for 50% off back then, because a friend read they sucked for NAS usage, because of headparking issues :peace: Solution...Disable it.
When I think Seagate, I think Maxtor (which they bought - Made terrible terrible drives too). Reminds me of IBM Deathstar days.
Now, the backblaze reports aren't really drives that we as consumers care about. They're using mostly noisy, hot, expensive enterprise capacity drives. Meanwhile, consumers tend to be buying NAS drives like WD Reds and Ironwolf models.
As an enterprise datacenter user, reliability is kind of a moot point. You buy your storage, you throw a whole bunch together into failure-tolerant arrays with hot-spares and then you have backups of those arrays.
DISKS WILL DIE. ANY MODEL, ANY BRAND. You expect to replace a few disks a year and for those that I replace myself I see a pretty even spread of HGST, Seagate, Toshiba. I don't see any WD simply because the storage vendors I use (HP, Nimble, Imation, Dell) don't tend to sell WD.
A 1.5% AFR is nothing out of the oridinary and for the market that any of those enterprise disks target, AFR is not even in the top 3 things buyers are looking for in a mechanical drive.