September 23, 2014 at 21:55Backblaze updated HDD reliability statistics
In January of this year, Backblaze first published statistics on the use of disk drives in its servers. Backblaze provides a cheap cloud backup service and therefore is purchased with inexpensive consumer-grade HDDs, which are 2-2.5 times cheaper than Enterprise HDDs. For four years, a large statistics on the reliability of Seagate, Hitachi and Western Digital discs has been collected.
The time has come for the September update of statistics .
The Backblaze data center has 38,441 disks, which store more than 100 petabytes of information. The company duplicates all the data, so failure of each drive is not a problem. It is simply replaced with another, and the information is restored from the backup. Nevertheless, the company is interested in using more reliable media, and therefore monitors statistics on models.
The chart above is not too different from January. The gray color indicates the frequency of failures until the end of 2013 (January indicator), the colored bars represent the frequency of failures throughout the sample, taking into account statistics until the end of June 2014.
An unpleasant surprise for Backblaze was the fact that Seagate 3 TB drives began to fail much more often. For them, the failure rate increased from 9% to 15%. The same bad trend is observed with Western Digital drives at 3 TB: the percentage of failures increased from 4% to 7%.
The table below shows the full statistics: total number, average age, and annual failure rate for all models.
HGST wheels are pleased so far: in a couple of months not a single one broke.
The time has come for the September update of statistics .
The Backblaze data center has 38,441 disks, which store more than 100 petabytes of information. The company duplicates all the data, so failure of each drive is not a problem. It is simply replaced with another, and the information is restored from the backup. Nevertheless, the company is interested in using more reliable media, and therefore monitors statistics on models.
The chart above is not too different from January. The gray color indicates the frequency of failures until the end of 2013 (January indicator), the colored bars represent the frequency of failures throughout the sample, taking into account statistics until the end of June 2014.
An unpleasant surprise for Backblaze was the fact that Seagate 3 TB drives began to fail much more often. For them, the failure rate increased from 9% to 15%. The same bad trend is observed with Western Digital drives at 3 TB: the percentage of failures increased from 4% to 7%.
The table below shows the full statistics: total number, average age, and annual failure rate for all models.
| Model | Volume | Number of discs | Average age in years | Annual percentage of refusals |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seagate Desktop HDD.15 (ST4000DM000) | 4.0TB | 9619 | 0.6 | 3.0% |
| Hitachi GST Deskstar 7K2000 (HDS722020ALA330) | 2.0TB | 4706 | 3.4 | 1.1% |
| Hitachi GST Deskstar 5K3000 (HDS5C3030ALA630) | 3.0TB | 4593 | 2.1 | 0.7% |
| Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 (ST3000DM001) | 3.0TB | 3846 | 1.9 | 15.7% |
| HGST Megascale 4000.B (HMS5C4040BLE640) | 4.0TB | 2884 | 0.2 | - |
| Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 (HDS5C4040ALE630) | 4.0TB | 2627 | 1.2 | 1.2% |
| Seagate Barracuda LP (ST31500541AS) | 1.5TB | 1699 | 4.3 | 9.6% |
| HGST Megascale 4000 (HMS5C4040ALE640) | 4.0TB | 1305 | 0.1 | - |
| Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 (HDS723030ALA640) | 3.0TB | 1022 | 2.6 | 1.4% |
| Western Digital Red (WD30EFRX) | 3.0TB | 776 | 0.5 | 8.8% |
| Western Digital Caviar Green (WD10EADS) | 1.0TB | 476 | 4.6 | 3.8% |
| Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (ST31500341AS) | 1.5TB | 365 | 4.3 | 24.9% |
| Seagate Barracuda XT (ST33000651AS) | 3.0TB | 318 | 2.2 | 6.7% |