![]() These ratios began to change in the 2020s, with Toshiba taking huge chunks out of Seagate's drive capacity. Toshiba and Western Digital meanwhile made up an incredibly small amount of capacity, with less than 5% of the total hard drive capacity combined. HGST took second place with an average of 25% of Backblaze's storage capacity. From Q3 2017 through Q3 2019, Backblaze's storage servers were predominantly populated with Seagate-branded hard drives, which making up around 70% of the companies entire storage volume. Not everyone agreed with the conclusions, but few could find fault with Backblaze's underlying mission.įor those who want to crunch the numbers themselves, Backblaze plans to make available the raw data from the 2014 drive pool study in the next couple of weeks, along with more details on how it computed failure rates.Moving on, Backblaze also shared a graph of its drive models based on the brand, and how the company has shifted to different brands over the past six years of operation. It found that keeping a drive cooler than its recommended operating temperature had no discernible effect on its longevity. Not long after its 2014 hard-drive reliability report, the company analyzed the effect of cooling on drive lifetimes. ![]() The HGST drives profiled in Backblaze's analysis were all Deskstar or Megascale models, the latter composed of 4TB drives designed for "low application workloads that operate within 180TB per year." Other drives in HGST's lineup include helium-filled 8TB and 10TB drives, with the helium providing greater capacity and lower power consumption, although Backblaze hasn't used those drives in its tests, preferring instead to stick with low-cost consumer drives purchased in bulk.īackblaze has been using its data center as a source of eye-opening and sometimes hotly contested insights. Western Digital acquired Hitachi's hard drive business and turned it into HGST back in 2012 it was originally created in 2003 when IBM and Hitachi merged their hard disk manufacturing concerns. Its failure stats were less than 5 percent for the course of the year, but Backblaze cautioned it hasn't been using them for long enough to compute robust failure statistics. Western Digital had no 4TB drives in the running, but Backblaze used 6TB drives from the company's line, the Western Digital Red. However, 3TB drive were less impressive, and Backblaze promised to dig into the story behind Seagate's striking failure rates there in a future post. The best results were with 4TB drives, which showed a marked decline in failure rates since the previous year's statistics - both between HGST and Seagate. That said, the company believes a handful of the most critical criteria, such as the uncorrectable error count or the count of reallocated sectors, are reliable indicators of failure based on what it's seen in its drive pools. This last criterion can be tricky Backblaze itself notes that SMART stat reporting isn't consistent between many drives. What constitutes a failure to Backblaze? Aside from obvious mechanical problems - the drive won't spin up or be recognized by the OS - Backblaze included any drives that would not sync properly with a RAID array or reported SMART statistics that were out of the acceptable range. As with last year, its 4TB models were far more durable than its other offerings, failing at around half the rate of the previous year. Its drives didn't do well in the first roundup and this year sported failure rates as high as 43 percent annually. Seagate, on the other hand, is another story. HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary, did best, but stats on WD's 6TB drive line remain preliminary. Hard drive failures by manufacturer over the course of one year. "It’s hard to beat the current crop of 4TB drives from HGST and Seagate," Backblaze said in its blog post. ![]() Western Digital itself came in second, with numbers only slightly less impressive than HGST's. Hitachi (now HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital) has the lowest failure rates across the makes and models surveyed. The results, assembled from a data set more than twice as large as the previous year's, square with the earlier findings. Now Backblaze is back with another year's worth of stats, harvested from the consumer-level drives running in its custom-designed and open-sourced Storage Pod drive racks. Hitachi and Western Digital came out at the top Seagate, not so much. Last year, cloud backup service Backblaze crunched statistics about which makes and models of the tens of thousands of drives humming away in its data centers held up best under stress.
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