As of September 30, 2018 Backblaze had 99,636 spinning hard drives. Of that number, there were 1,866 boot drives and 97,770 data drives. This review looks at the quarterly and lifetime statistics for the data drive models in operation in our data centers. In addition, we'll say goodbye to the last of our 3TB drives, hello to our new 12TB HGST drives, and we'll explain how we have 584 fewer drives than last quarter, but have added over 40 petabytes of storage.

Hard Drive Reliability Statistics for Q3 2018
At the end of Q3 2018, Backblaze was monitoring 97,770 hard drives used to store 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 45 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 97,600 hard drives. The table below covers what happened in Q3 2018.

Gigabyte today announced they were expanding their SSD storage lineup (started with the UD PRO series SATA III SSDs) with M.2 solutions. The new SSDs transfer data under the NVMe protocol and carry the M.2 form factor, in 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB sizes.

According to Gigabyte's own product pages, the 256 GB version has a sequential read and write speed of up to 1200 MB/s and 800 MB/s, while the 128 GB model cuts those speeds down to 1100 MB/s read and 500 MB/s write.

Marvell today announced the industry's first NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) SSD converter controller, the 88SN2400 designed and optimized to convert an NVMe SSD into an NVMe-oF SSD.

By bringing low latency access over the fabric and exposing the entire SSD bandwidth to the network, the Marvell controller supports true scalable, high-performance disaggregation of storage from compute. The 88SN2400 utilizes a simple, low-power and compute-less Ethernet fabric instead of a traditional PCIe fabric controlled and managed by an enterprise-class server SoC with integrated 100GE controllers.

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. today announced that Super Micro Computer, Inc. has successfully qualified the MG07ACA Series 14TB and 12TB HDD SATA models on select Supermicro storage server platforms. Using a 9-disk, helium-sealed design, the new MG07ACA Series provides power-efficient capacity and storage density, which is now available on Supermicro's popular SuperStorage (SSG) line-up of server platforms. The MG07 Series industry-leading 14TB capacity allows data center customers a choice of storage server platform solutions available through Supermicro's extensive network of distributors as well as systems and solutions integrators.

"As we continue to develop solutions to meet the growing capacity needs of enterprise and cloud data center customers, Toshiba is pleased to be working with Supermicro on solutions utilizing our new MG07ACA Series helium-sealed HDD," said Kyle Yamamoto, Vice President of HDD Business Unit, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. "Toshiba's innovative, power-efficient 9-disk design delivers the highest capacity available in the market today using conventional magnetic recording, and matches up well with Supermicro's highly-regarded lineup of server and storage solutions."

Latticework, Inc. today introduced Amber: the world's first personal hybrid cloud storage platform. Amber is a multimedia storage and streaming device that gives users complete control over their digital assets, offering the convenience of the cloud in the privacy of their own homes. With Amber, users' life memories and digital files are always secure, while Amber's companion app ensures that they are always within reach to access, relive and share. Amber is the debut product from Latticework, Inc., a company founded by storage pioneer and Marvell co-founder, Dr. Pantas Sutardja, to tackle escalating consumer storage and bandwidth use. Watch this video to learn more about Amber.

Amber offers security and convenience without compromising digital data, privacy or peace of mind. "Your personal data and memories are just that - yours. Why would you want to give complete strangers or cloud providers access to your data?" said Dr. Pantas Sutardja, founder & CEO, Latticework, Inc. "Amber makes storage personal, enabling you to protect, control and secure your digital life, while seamlessly allowing you to relive and share life's memories with only the people you choose."

GIGABYTE has released a compelling new choice in storage servers with a unique combination of performance, capacity and flexibility: the S451-3R0. Powered by dual Intel Xeon Scalable processors and with a capacity of 36 x 3.5" + 2 x 2.5" SSD / HDD, the S451-3R0 provides the best balance of throughput and density, making it extremely suitable for block or object storage, streaming media and big data.

Dual Intel Xeon Scalable Processors
The S451-3R0 features dual Intel Xeon Scalable processors, with up to 28 cores per CPU, making it extremely suitable for storage applications where high performance or heavy workloads are required. Each CPU socket supports the highest CPU thermal design power requirement of 205W, as well as Intel's Omni-Path connection technology to eliminate CPU to network latency. Six memory channels per CPU with two DIMM slots per channel are supported for DDR4 memory. Maximum memory capacity will depend on your CPU model with a maximum of 1.5TB per CPU.

As of March 31, 2018 we had 100,110 spinning hard drives. Of that number, there were 1,922 boot drives and 98,188 data drives. This review looks at the quarterly and lifetime statistics for the data drive models in operation in our data centers. We'll also take a look at why we are collecting and reporting 10 new SMART attributes and take a sneak peek at some 8 TB Toshiba drives. Along the way, we'll share observations and insights on the data presented and we look forward to you doing the same in the comments.

AKITIO announced today at the NAB show several new products to their already impressive Thunderbolt 3 line-up. New products include a Thunderbolt 3 10GbE docking station, an 8-bay hardware RAID enclosure, a dual-slot PCIe box, and a RED camera Mini-Mag reader. These new products are ideal for the content creator audience at NAB who have an insatiable appetite for fast, scalable storage and connectivity options to optimize workflow.

The new Thunder3 Dock Pro features a 10GbE port, a DisplayPort port, three USB 3.1 ports, an eSATA port, an SD Card reader, a C-Fast card reader, and two Thunderbolt 3 Ports for daisy chaining. The Thunderbolt 3 ports provide 60 Watts of Power Delivery (PD).

Marvell, a leader in storage, networking and connectivity semiconductor solutions, today announced that it is launching innovative NVM Express (NVMe)-based chipset solutions that will accelerate the time to market for application-optimized data center SSD implementations. These new, highly-versatile building blocks can optimally address current and emerging workload storage requirements, spanning capacity, latency, performance, power and cost, to enable tailored SSD solutions for specific cloud and enterprise workloads.

The proliferation of cloud services and new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, is driving various workloads in the data center. These evolving and expanding workloads can have differing storage requirements that emerging SSD form factors are targeted to address. Marvell has developed innovative NVMe chipsets capable of powering the larger Enterprise Data Storage Form Factors (EDSFF), Next Generation Small Form Factors (NGSFF) and various customized form factors, providing the ability to increase storage capacity, performance and overall workload efficiencies.

OWC, a leading zero emissions Mac and PC technology company, is making drive juggling a thing of the past with the new OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad. The new external storage solution offers four drive bays to provide massive amounts of storage from a single USB-C connection, with the flexibility to be utilized in Mac, PC and mixed Mac/PC environments. Designed for users who require high capacity storage with fast transfer speeds, the Mercury Elite Pro Quad is ideal for use by post- production firms, photographers, creative agencies, higher education programs, and small businesses.

Crucial, a leading global brand of memory and storage upgrades, today announced the availability of the Crucial MX500 SSD. The new drive features second generation Micron 3D NAND technology and is 45 times more energy efficient than a typical hard drive. Available in capacities up to 2TB in the 2.5-inch form factor and up to 1TB in the M.2 form factor, the MX500 has sequential reads/writes up to 560/510 MB/s and random reads/writes up to 95K/90K IOPS.

"This next generation MX500 SSD features a stackable 64-layer, 256-gigabit component. Micron's floating gate NAND is designed with CMOS Under the Array (CUA), which allows us to minimize the footprint of the die. At 59 square millimeters, it's among the world's smallest 256-gigabit die," said Jon Tanguy, Crucial Senior SSD Product Engineer. "Our engineering team has incorporated this leading-edge NAND technology in an SSD that includes all the advanced features Crucial customers have come to expect to keep their data safe."

Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in data storage solutions, today announced a range of new products at the CES 2018 conference designed to equip the world's increasingly mobile population with solutions that solve key challenges they face when creating, processing and accessing their data on-the-go.

"Our world is becoming more data-centric, connected and mobile. This means creating, transferring, storing and accessing data quickly and reliably is critical to unlocking the potential of everything - from data created in the field, to data powering self-driving cars, AI personal assistants or virtual and mixed reality experiences," said Tim Bucher, senior vice president of Seagate consumer solutions. "At Seagate, we're constantly pursuing innovative ways to address our customer needs so they can gain a competitive edge in whichever field they play."

At today's Consumer Electronics Show 2018 (CES 2018), Western Digital unveiled new and breakthrough consumer solutions that address today's personal content explosion, including voice-activated media streaming via popular Smart Home devices, the world's smallest 1TB USB flash drive and a portfolio of ultra-mobile, high-performance, wireless and high-capacity flash storage products. Sold under the SanDisk and WD brands, these offerings ensure that personal experiences and memories can thrive for years to come.

Smartphones, drones, action cameras and virtual reality (VR) goggles are capturing and creating rich content that users want to access and share with friends and followers alike. Innovations in multi-lens cameras, 8K video, 5G wireless, VR, augmented reality (AR) and video streaming are enabling more immersive experiences. As a result, consumers are looking for easier ways to capture, preserve, access and share their personal content as it becomes richer and more robust.

Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation today announced the launch of the MG07ACA Series, the world's first enterprise 14TB Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) HDD. Using a 9-disk, helium-sealed design, the new MG07ACA Series provides the power-efficient capacity and storage density needed by cloud-scale and enterprise storage solution providers to achieve their TCO objectives.

"We have raised the bar with the new MG07ACA Series 9-disk helium-sealed design," said Akitoshi Iwata, Vice President of Storage Products Division, Toshiba Electronic Devices and Storage Corporation. "By utilizing an innovative design, we continue to improve the benefits that high-capacity disk storage can deliver to our broad global customer base."

Apacer knows it best when it comes to speed and uncompromised gaming performance. Z280, the latest answer to advanced SSDs, supports PCIe Gen 3 x4 and is compliant with NVMe 1.2 in a M.2 form factor. The blazing speed will boost the game status without getting too costly. With sustained read/write performance at 2750MB/s and 1500MB/s, the compact M.2-2280 keeps everything efficient at a massive capacity of 480GB. Want to be one step ahead of others? Look no further than Z280, the high-performing SSD that is compatible with mini PCs and laptops.

Rapidity & Jumbo Storage
Built with upscale SSD technologies that Apacer is synonymous for and excellent quality MLC, the cutting-edge Z280 is compliant with NVMe 1.2 standard and features the latest PCIe Gen 3 x4 interface to provide up to 4 times of bandwidth. The expert team at Apacer raised the bar of the industry by creating a blistering transmission at 2750/MB & 1500MB per second. Offering a massive memory capacity of 480GB, Z280 has a random write of 175,000 IOPs to ensure all actions in each gaming scene is smoothly processed, fluid and sharp, efficiently boosting a gamer's status.

Today, Intel announces major data center storage advances, reiterating Intel's memory technology leadership. The new technologies advance data center storage and deliver innovative solutions to meet the challenges presented by the growing reliance on data. They include:

• "Ruler" form factor for Intel SSDs, an all-new solid state drive form factor enabling up to 1PB of storage in a 1U server rack in the future.
• The world's most advanced dual port portfolio: Intel Optane technology dual port SSDs and Intel 3D NAND dual port SSDs for mission-critical applications.
• An updated SATA family of SSDs for data center, targeted at HDD replacement.

"We are in the midst of an era of major data center transformation, driven by Intel. These new "ruler" form factor SSDs and dual port SSDs are the latest in a long line of innovations we've brought to market to make storing and accessing data easier and faster, while delivering more value to customers," said Bill Leszinske, Intel vice president, Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG), and director, strategic planning, marketing and business development. "Data drives everything we do - from financial decisions to virtual reality gaming, and from autonomous driving to machine learning - and Intel storage innovations like these ensure incredibly quick, reliable access to that data."

GIGABYTE today announced its latest generation of servers based on Intel's Skylake Purley architecture. This new generation brings a wealth of new options in scalability - across compute, network and storage - to deliver solutions for any application, from the enterprise to the data center to HPC. (Jump ahead to system introductions).

This server series adopts Intel's new product family - officially named the 'Intel Xeon Scalable family' and utilizes its ability to meet the increasingly diverse requirements of the industry, from entry-level HPC to large scale clusters.. The major development in this platform is around the improved features and functionality at both the host and fabric levels. These enable performance improvements - both natively on chip and for future extensibility through compute, network and storage peripherals. In practical terms, these new CPUs will offer up to 28 cores, and 48 PCIe lanes per socket.

Seagate has announced that the company is launching its Duet external hard drive, which would be, in all regards, a run-of-the-mill external hard drive (based on the company's Backup Plus Portable Drive), were it not for the fact that it runs tailored software that syncs its contents with the Amazon Drive service. The drive automatically downloads and uploads content from (and to) Amazon Drive to enable instant and offline access to data stored in the cloud - allowing you to not only store your data on the Cloud, but also keep a physical copy of it with you.

ASUS' ROG Maximus IX Code, the company's step-down product from the already detailed Maximus IX Formula, has also been leaked. Like the Formula, it's in the ATX form factor with the red and black colors of the ROG line; the difference between thie Maximus IX Hero and the Code stands in that the Hero is absent from the Code's PCB front shielding, the 2×2 MU-MIMO 802.11 AC WI-FI capabilities, as well as the and USB 2.0 (2+4) front panel connectors, putting it in an even lower tier in product placement, and, we expect, pricing (though, being part of the ROG line, that doesn't mean it will be cheap).

Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in storage solutions, today announced the launch of the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim, the world's thinnest 2TB mobile hard drive. This new product builds on the award-winning Backup Plus Slim drive, delivering a stunning new design with the same leading capacity in an even slimmer profile. The Backup Plus Ultra Slim also includes 200GB of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage and Lyve software compatibility, so users can back up, access and share their favorite files from any device or location.

"The launch of the Backup Plus Ultra Slim builds on Seagate's rich history of award-winning innovation to give users even more capacity in an incredibly small form factor," said Tim Bucher, vice president for Seagate's Consumer Group. "Based on our breakthrough ultra-mobile hard drive technology, this new storage solution gives them a better way to manage the increase in both data volumes and number of devices."

Seagate Technology plc. today introduced ClusterStor A200, a first-of-its-kind tiered archive storage system for high performance computing (HPC). The A200 helps reduce storage and operational costs by up to 50 percent compared to tier-one storage platforms.

The A200 was designed to complement the rest of Seagate's ClusterStor family of scale-out storage systems. It allows customers to non-disruptively migrate designated data off of the performance-optimized, primary storage tiers while keeping it online for fast retrieval. This avoids a common problem in shared HPC environments where the organization is forced to choose between having all of the data available to make the best analysis versus the time required to retrieve data from tape. Performance of the primary storage is often improved by migrating data and freeing up space for more efficient data layout. The pre-configured ClusterStor A200 solution includes an automatic policy-driven hierarchical storage management (HSM) system and near limitless scale-out capacity.

OCZ Storage Solutions -- a Toshiba Group Company and provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced the introduction of Host Managed SSD (HMS) technology, first supported by the Saber 1000 Series SSDs. HMS technology enables Host controls over internal SSD background processing tasks that were previously not exposed to host-level software. System-level software control of background processing tasks, such as Garbage Collection, enable improving overall storage performance, and specifically enable obtaining consistent and predictable latency across a large pool of SSDs.

Hyperscale, Cloud, and datacenters now run software defined storage applications which manage large pools of SSDs across multiple servers. Consistent performance of these SSDs is critical to many modern applications, such as modern data bases and online trading, that have migrated to the Cloud. Exposing HMS functions via API enables integration of HMS functions into the storage stacks.

The Storage Products Business Unit of Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., a committed technology leader, announces a new, high-capacity addition to the MC04 Series launched in May of last year. The 6TB version of the MC04 Series of enterprise high-capacity HDDs is designed for bulk storage systems and servers supporting cloud-based applications and scale-out workloads. With an industry standard 3.5-inch form factor, the MC04 Series delivers 7,200 revolutions per minute (RPM) performance, enabling suitable service levels for high performance cloud-based applications and storage.

Toshiba's highest capacity enterprise cloud HDD delivers a 20 percent increase over the previous generation's 5TB capacity, enabling more efficient high-density, high-growth storage for multi-petabyte rack deployments. Furthermore, the newest addition to the MC04 Series improves ROI for scale-out storage solutions with a 20 percent increase in power efficiency (TB/W) over previous generations, enabling more cost-effective delivery of cloud storage services.

Want a compact gaming PC that doubles up as a home storage? The CS380 "Compact Storage" case could be worth checking out. This micro-ATX case features an aluminium door (with noise-dampening material), steel frame, and ABS front panel bits. Behind the door are eight 3.5-inch drive caddies, with SATA backplanes, which let you hot-swap drives; and a standard 5.25-inch drive bay. Apart from the eight 3.5-inch caddies, the case has two internal 2.5-inch drive bays (for OS drives).

The eight 3.5-inch caddies are split between two drive cages of four; which are separated by room meant for long graphics cards. Its ventilation includes two 92 mm front intakes (located in the space between the drive cages); two 120 mm side vents, two 120 mm top vents (which can hold on to a 240 mm radiator); and a 120 mm rear exhaust. The case measures 212 mm x 435 mm x 444 mm (WxHxD).

Crucial, a leading global brand of memory and storage upgrades, today announced significant updates to its Storage Executive tool. The new version (3.20) features Momentum Cache, an intelligent caching feature that can enhance burst performance by up to 10x[1], and allows users to extend SSD lifetime by reducing redundant writes. The tool uses idle memory for caching as needed, and installs easily via the Storage Executive interface.

In addition to the new features, Storage Executive also allows users to:

• Update to the latest firmware
• Monitor drive's temperature and health
• Reset the drive's encryption password
• Easily check how much storage has been used