12 ms·

Yev here from Backblaze -> The Western Digital drives that you've purchased will fail too. That's part of the whole point of these reports, all of the drives ev

by atYevP 7y ago

Yev here from Backblaze -> The Western Digital drives that you've purchased will fail too. That's part of the whole point of these reports, all of the drives eventually fail out or reach a state where we have to replace them - it's not any one specific manufacturer. That's part of why having a backup is so important, even the SSDs in newer machines will eventually go wonky.

Scramblejams 7y ago
Thanks for posting this data! I love it! I appreciate your diplomatic language, but the time to failure does matter, and consumers don’t have the same cost structure that incentivizes replacing working drives the way you do. FWIW I share GP’s experience with Seagate. I had quite a few of them, ranging in size from 500 gigs to 2TB. Every last one of them died relatively quickly, while most of my Hitachis, Toshibas, and WDs from that era still work. Seagate earned a permanent boycott from this customer.
- cheeze 7y ago
  WD isn't much better, but Backblaze stats have consistently shown Seagate to be higher failure rate than everybody else out there. Good riddance.
  - vorticalbox 7y ago
    As noted above all driver will fail, though I get your point I think saying that seagate driver time to fail is lower is a fairer statement.
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    I just purchased a newer WD Red (WD80EFAX) to replace an older HGST (pre-WD if memory serves) drive. That drive (and another of the same model I purchased elsewhere to test) is not recognized by the UEFI on the motherboard. The OS probes the drive and fails to negotiate DMA transfers. Turns out there is a publicly available KB article that mentions known bugs with transfer rate negotiation on some of their SATA3 drives. Of course WD won't say which drives. There's even a utility referenced in the article that you can use to disable SATA3 support. But WD won't make it publicly utility. Meanwhile their support is stuck in a "have you tried power cycling the computer" loop. If memory serves Western Digital / HGST / SanDisk were among the first to jack up prices after the Thailand disasters. Fuck em. Meanwhile is the difference in failure rate between Seagate and Western Digital even statistically significant? For most comparisons you're looking at a fraction of a percent.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  This data isn't particularly useful in more ways than that because there are a lot of variables that differ between running in a data center vs desktop/home NAS. I like reading these data because it's interesting to me, but I make purchasing decisions based on other sources, usually in terms of ease of dealing with support for end customers (when I need a drive replaced), noise (it's in my house), heat sensitivity (my house is warmer than a data center), and sensitivity to things like vibration (my case is far less stable than enterprise storage clusters). That being said, I occasionally use these data to break ties or see variations between generations of drives.
willis936 7y ago
Do you think the seagate barracuda deserves to take the “death star” title from HGST? I think HGST has redeemed themselves with sub 1% failure rates for years. Seagate managed to put out a 30% failure rate drive.
- protomyth 7y ago
  I'm not sure about today, but 4 years ago we bought 120 HP notebooks from Verizon (they had cell modems in them) to use with a project. We had a horrendous failure rate of 100 hard drives in the first six months. They were Seagate drives. We ended up just replacing the remaining 20s hard drives as a preventative measure.
- vidarh 7y ago
  The "Death Star" title really belongs only to that one specific model (75GXP) produced by IBM and its spectacular failure mode (shredding the magnetic media off the platter almost entirely in some cases)
  - willis936 7y ago
    It came with a failure auto audio alarm!
    - vidarh 7y ago
      I've never gotten to hear one fail, but these were the way I learned never to use drives from a single batch in a RAID array back in the day (most of the time these days I never match models in a single array and try to avoid matching manufacturers; gotten paranoid over the years after successive RAID failures) Thankfully it was just stressful - we had backups, but drives in our array started failing one by one, with about a weeks interval; unfortunately it took something like 4 days to rebuild the array each time, so we wasted a lot of time shifting writes elsewhere so the last backup we had + writes going elsewhere combined remained recent enough in case a second drive would fail. We got off easy, but the time we spent probably cost us more than having set up a more redundant system in the first time would have.
  - 7y ago
piepoter 7y ago
Then I stand corrected. Is there anyway to avoid drive failures or should we accept the fact that they will break eventually? Also, the data is interesting and appreciated.
- madeofpalk 7y ago
  All things fail eventually.
- protomyth 7y ago
  Buy a RAID enclosure or setup a home RAIDed server and do backups. You cannot avoid it but you can mitigate the damage.
  - derekp7 7y ago
    I really wish that consumer OSs would mandate RAID (mirroring at the minimum), requiring additional steps to install on unprotected storage. This should have been implemented even back during the early days of consumer hard drives, or at the minimum have a warning on boot that "Your data is stored on temporary storage -- go [here] to configure redundancy". At least something that puts it front and center that storing data on a single hard drive will eventually lead to data loss. Also would be nice to have a similar warning to "Your data has not been backed up in [x] days".
    - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
      I use a Mac. I get those warnings. I use a Synology drive (using Synology's RAID-like format) for my Time Machine backups, and a Drobo for my less critical stuff. They have WD drives. I have not liked the Seagates. However, I like the HGST stats. One of the nice things about both Drobo and Synology, is that I can change the drive type and capacity "on the fly."
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      Ugh, god why? Why must people in our industry daydream about over-complicating things all the time? Very few use-cases benefit significantly from mirrored disks. The amount of data a user actually cares about having a backup of is often significantly smaller than the OS and related garbage on a disk that they can do without. Besides which, a local mirror isn't a good backup anyway!
ramraj07 7y ago
I feel like there might be a difference - do drives fail more if they're not continuously running? When I was working in a lab it was generally close to 70% failure rates for drives that were sitting in a box for more than a couple years.
ravedave5 7y ago
Yev - have you considered adding in some SSD drives just to see how well they last & what failure modes they have vs HDDs?
- atYevP 7y ago
  Good question and nope. They're simply too expensive for us. As they get lower in price they do become more interesting, but their $ to density is just nowhere near where we'd need it to be in order to continue providing our service at the rate we do. Some of our boot drives are becoming SSDs though, and they are in the "raw" data that we publish.

by atYevP 7y ago

Scramblejams 7y ago

Thanks for posting this data! I love it! I appreciate your diplomatic language, but the time to failure does matter, and consumers don’t have the same cost structure that incentivizes replacing working drives the way you do. FWIW I share GP’s experience with Seagate. I had quite a few of them, ranging in size from 500 gigs to 2TB. Every last one of them died relatively quickly, while most of my Hitachis, Toshibas, and WDs from that era still work. Seagate earned a permanent boycott from this customer.

cheeze 7y ago
WD isn't much better, but Backblaze stats have consistently shown Seagate to be higher failure rate than everybody else out there. Good riddance.
- vorticalbox 7y ago
  As noted above all driver will fail, though I get your point I think saying that seagate driver time to fail is lower is a fairer statement.
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  I just purchased a newer WD Red (WD80EFAX) to replace an older HGST (pre-WD if memory serves) drive. That drive (and another of the same model I purchased elsewhere to test) is not recognized by the UEFI on the motherboard. The OS probes the drive and fails to negotiate DMA transfers. Turns out there is a publicly available KB article that mentions known bugs with transfer rate negotiation on some of their SATA3 drives. Of course WD won't say which drives. There's even a utility referenced in the article that you can use to disable SATA3 support. But WD won't make it publicly utility. Meanwhile their support is stuck in a "have you tried power cycling the computer" loop. If memory serves Western Digital / HGST / SanDisk were among the first to jack up prices after the Thailand disasters. Fuck em. Meanwhile is the difference in failure rate between Seagate and Western Digital even statistically significant? For most comparisons you're looking at a fraction of a percent.
beatgammit 7y ago
This data isn't particularly useful in more ways than that because there are a lot of variables that differ between running in a data center vs desktop/home NAS. I like reading these data because it's interesting to me, but I make purchasing decisions based on other sources, usually in terms of ease of dealing with support for end customers (when I need a drive replaced), noise (it's in my house), heat sensitivity (my house is warmer than a data center), and sensitivity to things like vibration (my case is far less stable than enterprise storage clusters). That being said, I occasionally use these data to break ties or see variations between generations of drives.

willis936 7y ago

Do you think the seagate barracuda deserves to take the “death star” title from HGST? I think HGST has redeemed themselves with sub 1% failure rates for years. Seagate managed to put out a 30% failure rate drive.

protomyth 7y ago
I'm not sure about today, but 4 years ago we bought 120 HP notebooks from Verizon (they had cell modems in them) to use with a project. We had a horrendous failure rate of 100 hard drives in the first six months. They were Seagate drives. We ended up just replacing the remaining 20s hard drives as a preventative measure.
vidarh 7y ago
The "Death Star" title really belongs only to that one specific model (75GXP) produced by IBM and its spectacular failure mode (shredding the magnetic media off the platter almost entirely in some cases)
- willis936 7y ago
  It came with a failure auto audio alarm!
  - vidarh 7y ago
    I've never gotten to hear one fail, but these were the way I learned never to use drives from a single batch in a RAID array back in the day (most of the time these days I never match models in a single array and try to avoid matching manufacturers; gotten paranoid over the years after successive RAID failures) Thankfully it was just stressful - we had backups, but drives in our array started failing one by one, with about a weeks interval; unfortunately it took something like 4 days to rebuild the array each time, so we wasted a lot of time shifting writes elsewhere so the last backup we had + writes going elsewhere combined remained recent enough in case a second drive would fail. We got off easy, but the time we spent probably cost us more than having set up a more redundant system in the first time would have.
- 7y ago

piepoter 7y ago

Then I stand corrected. Is there anyway to avoid drive failures or should we accept the fact that they will break eventually? Also, the data is interesting and appreciated.

madeofpalk 7y ago
All things fail eventually.
protomyth 7y ago
Buy a RAID enclosure or setup a home RAIDed server and do backups. You cannot avoid it but you can mitigate the damage.
- derekp7 7y ago
  I really wish that consumer OSs would mandate RAID (mirroring at the minimum), requiring additional steps to install on unprotected storage. This should have been implemented even back during the early days of consumer hard drives, or at the minimum have a warning on boot that "Your data is stored on temporary storage -- go [here] to configure redundancy". At least something that puts it front and center that storing data on a single hard drive will eventually lead to data loss. Also would be nice to have a similar warning to "Your data has not been backed up in [x] days".
  - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
    I use a Mac. I get those warnings. I use a Synology drive (using Synology's RAID-like format) for my Time Machine backups, and a Drobo for my less critical stuff. They have WD drives. I have not liked the Seagates. However, I like the HGST stats. One of the nice things about both Drobo and Synology, is that I can change the drive type and capacity "on the fly."
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Ugh, god why? Why must people in our industry daydream about over-complicating things all the time? Very few use-cases benefit significantly from mirrored disks. The amount of data a user actually cares about having a backup of is often significantly smaller than the OS and related garbage on a disk that they can do without. Besides which, a local mirror isn't a good backup anyway!

ramraj07 7y ago

I feel like there might be a difference - do drives fail more if they're not continuously running? When I was working in a lab it was generally close to 70% failure rates for drives that were sitting in a box for more than a couple years.

ravedave5 7y ago

Yev - have you considered adding in some SSD drives just to see how well they last & what failure modes they have vs HDDs?

atYevP 7y ago
Good question and nope. They're simply too expensive for us. As they get lower in price they do become more interesting, but their $ to density is just nowhere near where we'd need it to be in order to continue providing our service at the rate we do. Some of our boot drives are becoming SSDs though, and they are in the "raw" data that we publish.