Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q3 2016

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Backbalze has releases a new listing of HDD failure rates for Q3 2016. They replaced a lot of 3TB with 8TB HDDs and had pretty good results it seems.

For Q3 2016 we have 67,642 drives, or 1,171 fewer hard drives. Stop, put down that Twitter account, Backblaze is not shrinking. In fact, we’re growing very nicely and are approaching 300 petabytes of data under our management. We have fewer drives because over the last quarter we swapped out more than 3,500 2 terabyte (TB) HGST and WDC hard drives for 2,400 8 TB Seagate drives. So we have fewer drives, but more data. Lots more data! We’ll get into the specifics a little later on, but first, let’s take a look at our Q3 2016 drive stats.

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Matches my experiences perfectly. I've been generally using Toshiba and HGST drives last couple of years without any problems. However, I had problems with some Seagate and WD drives and I had to return them.

 

Well, shit. I bought a 2TB WD Black because the available data at the time suggested WD had the best reliability outside of HGST

That's an alarming turnaround. Seagate is a perennial loser in these things though. I don't know why anyone would buy them anymore.

 

'cause there is who still believe Seagate is a reliable company...

 

It is surprising that WD is now so bad. Just from personal experience, they've lasted well beyond teh expected - in fact 0 failures. Approaching 10yrs use for one! Toshiba & Hitachi are kinda ongoing and in warranty, seem reliable enough. Might have to switch over in future. Hard drives are really only media server / archive nowadays, tho.

It goes without saying that nobody should buy Seagate. Last one I got (one of those - at the time - new 8TB shingled mangling things) failed catastrophically after a week. A new record, even for those bozos. The only real use they have is to attract crickets =)

 

HGST leads as lowest failure rate again it seems.

 

But how many "pieces" HGST sells on market? It could be interesting to know if HGST "high" quality is the consequence of a "low" production rate.

 

Please don't forget that this information is in no way a good indication on how the drives perform in a real consumer life, Blackblaze own words.

They give stats on how the failure rate is in they data centers. That is not home use. They're also _NOT_ using the drives made purposely for NAS and datacenter type of work. For Blackblaze it's cheaper to buy the default drives 'and accept a higher failure risk'. Drives will fail eventually, so they have a procedure for replacing it.. If they have to replace 100 disks each month or 130 makes no difference (in labour), if they're that much cheaper it's a win :P.

Also, for all manufacturers, you can't compare the failure rate of one model against others. The construction can be quite different between a 2GB model and a 3 GB model, let alone different revisions and production dates (or in other words, a bad run can occur everywhere. One driver with a high failure rate doesn't mean another model of the same manufacturer has the same failure rate. Can be worse, can be better).

While the information in these reports (going back a long time now) is pretty valuable for ICT infrastructure-engineers, for the common ICT professional - let alone home NAS or desktop use - it's pretty irrelevant, and articles quoting Blackblaze reports are commonly heavily criticized for not quoting Blackblaze's own warning about this and explaining the very specialized use-case here.

With that all said, go ahead and let the Seagate bashing continue, always nice to see

 

The Register explains here why you shouldn't really care about Backblaze's stats.

And here's how they transport the HDDs...

 

Dont give 1000% credit to this though. It doesnt mean all your WD HDDs are gonna explode now. Don't be alarmed like "Well shit just bought a WD Black". Anyways if you have very crucial data in your computer you should have at least one back up on a HDD you never use...

And in my experience WD is pretty reliable. Always bought WD drives and I've never had one failure, having 5(+1 40gb) of them right now in my PC, (SSD is a Crucial though), the oldest is a 40gb from 2003... Still working. Slow af though

What is very suprising to me is this rate from HGST (Hitachi), a brand that was placed for years just next to Seagate in the reliability benchmark, and I mean at the full bottom of it

 

Ive got two 320Gb WD blue HDDs one from 2008 and the other from 2009.One is a 2.5" laptop the other 3.5".
Both 100% health, no problematic weak or bad sectors.

 

I just got 4, 5 TB HGST for my NAS running quite good.

 

What kind of DAW is that fella running?