Backblaze Releases Q1 2018 Hard Drive Longevity, Reliability Stats

[cdawall]

I can assure you that WD Red drives are exceptional. I have 6, 8 and 10TB variants over a 4 year period. None of them have failed. None of them have any SMART errors.

I wouldn't go that far. I definitely shipped my share of WD reds of to data recovery centers for failure.

 

[Fx]

I wouldn't go that far. I definitely shipped my share of WD reds of to data recovery centers for failure.

There must be a difference in how the drive weres operated and the environment that they operated within then.

I keep my drives around 35c. I never spin them down. They all run on solid power supplies.

 

[cdawall]

There must be a difference in how the drive weres operated and the environment that they operated within then.

I keep my drives around 35c. I never spin them down. They all run on solid power supplies.

How many drives do you have total?

 

[Fx]

How many drives do you have total?

About 40.

 

[cdawall]

About 40.

I used to see hundreds of drives total a week. On average 1-2 of those was a red.

 

[Fx]

I used to see hundreds of drives total a week. On average 1-2 of those was a red.

So are saying that the hundreds of drives a week was comprised of various manufacturers and model types?

 

[GorbazTheDragon]

I can assure you that WD Red drives are exceptional. I have around 40 drives consisting of 6TB, 8TB and 10TB variants over a 4 year period. They run 24/7.

None of them have failed. None of them have any SMART errors.

I have nothing bad to say about my own experiences with the WD Reds, but that is not relevant when considering the statistical value of what is shown in the article, which is what I was making an argument about.

It just comes down to:

Even if you use their data, I don't see how you come to that conclusion. Their top 5 worst drives are WD, WD, Seagate, WD, Toshiba.

I mean, there are 3 WD drives on their lifetime chart, and two of those drives have the 1st and 2nd worst failure rates, and the third WD drive is the 4th worst failure rate.

 

[lexluthermiester]

You haven't read up much on this I take it?

Nope, just going on the graphs provided, which admittedly I may have misunderstood/misread.

 

[cdawall]

So are saying that the hundreds of drives a week was comprised of various manufacturers and model types?

Yes and that red's were not immune to being in the stack. In fact they were typically the most failed "new" drive I was getting. The rest was typically 1TB drives of old.

 

[Fx]

Yes and that red's were not immune to being in the stack. In fact they were typically the most failed "new" drive I was getting. The rest was typically 1TB drives of old.

Oh, right. No drive is ever immune and I certainly never meant that.

In your experience though, those percentages sound pretty good though in WD Reds favor because when a drive is bad by design, it will have a high failure rate even shortly after purchased. So basically, you would have seen many more Reds that had capacities of 4-10TB.

 

[John Naylor]

More data that has nothing to do with anything outside server farms ... from Backblaze again, the company who secured HDs in place w/ rubberbands and whose business model is built on using in expensive consumer drives in a server environment whereby the valuable features that make them great consumer drives lead to premature failure in a server environment.

There's no secret science here, if you want to know what is the most reliable brand or drive to put in your PC look at the real data on which drives are RMA'd most frequently .. it's published every 6 months @ hardware.fr

Head parking is an invaluable feature for consumer drives, when the doggie sleeping under ya desks jumps up when the kiddies get home from school, giving ya desk a shock = 6.4 on the richter scale, thank the manufacturer for head parking. Put that drive in a server and that protective feature will cause the drive to fail in 3 - 6 months. Why does BB buy them anyway ? ... it's cheaper than buying server drives.

Most recent consumer HD failure data ... the 1st number is last 6 month reporting period, and the 2nd is period before that

• HGST 0,82% (contre 1,13%) ... 0.975 over last year
• Seagate 0,93% (contre 0,72%) ... 0.825 over last year
• Toshiba 1,06% (contre 0,80%) ... 0.930 over last year
• Western 1,26% (contre 1,04%) ... 1.150 over last year

Drives w/ > 2% Failure rate

• 10,00% Seagate Desktop HDD 6 To
• 6,78% Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD 6 To
• 5,08% WD Black 3 To
• 4,70% Toshiba DT01ACA300 3 To
• 2,95% WD Red 4 To SATA 6Gb/s
• 2,81% Seagate IronWolf 4 To
• 2,49% WD Purple Videosurveillance 4 To
• 2,09% WD Red 3 To