Blackblaze 2015 drive failure report

[Lazybones]

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-2015/

Looks like I should stop purchasing Seagate drives and also stay away from western digital.

Looks like hitachi really turned around the desk star brand.

[Tom]

The HGST drives are known to be pretty good these days. Mind you i heard its only specific drives made in the old Hitachi factories, not the WD rebages.

[Thorin]

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-2015/

Looks like I should stop purchasing Seagate drives and also stay away from western digital.

Looks like hitachi really turned around the desk star brand.

From the article: "The Western Digital 1TB drives in use are nearly 6 years old on average. There are several drives with nearly 7 years of service. It wasn?t until 2015 that the failure rate rose above the annual average for all drives. This makes sense given the ?bathtub? curve of drive failure where drives over 4 years start to fail at a higher rate. Still the WD 1TB drives have performed well for a long time."

The failure rate of the WD drives is going up because the drives were bought six or so years ago.  Yeah, Caviar Green drives used for six years straight in a data center might start failing after six or more years...  Isn't there supposed to be a MTBF rating to correct for age versus failure rate, or something?

edit: I want to say, too, that I have WD Black drives at home and while they cost a little more they've lasted a long, long time.  I did have a couple of drives go bad, but that turned out to be an unstable power supply burning out the controller cards on the drives, and even then I was able to (very very slowly) recover the data onto another drive without data loss.

[Tom]

Also note that Green's are NOT rated for 24/7 operation. So the stated MTBF is not applicable to Backblaze's use-case.

I'm happy with the Reds I got. The failure rate on those is reasonable.

[Lazybones]

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-2015/

Looks like I should stop purchasing Seagate drives and also stay away from western digital.

Looks like hitachi really turned around the desk star brand.

From the article: "The Western Digital 1TB drives in use are nearly 6 years old on average. There are several drives with nearly 7 years of service. It wasn?t until 2015 that the failure rate rose above the annual average for all drives. This makes sense given the ?bathtub? curve of drive failure where drives over 4 years start to fail at a higher rate. Still the WD 1TB drives have performed well for a long time."

The failure rate of the WD drives is going up because the drives were bought six or so years ago.  Yeah, Caviar Green drives used for six years straight in a data center might start failing after six or more years...  Isn't there supposed to be a MTBF rating to correct for age versus failure rate, or something?

edit: I want to say, too, that I have WD Black drives at home and while they cost a little more they've lasted a long, long time.  I did have a couple of drives go bad, but that turned out to be an unstable power supply burning out the controller cards on the drives, and even then I was able to (very very slowly) recover the data onto another drive without data loss.

I was looking more at the plotted graph showing ALL data-points for HGST and Hitachi below the WD. which would be in their 3rd/4th year of 7 years of service at that point.. If it is a bathtub curve then those mid life drives still have a higher failure rate than HGST and Hitachi.

[Mr. Analog]

Hmm it might be time for me to finally replace my drive array

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