Backblaze: Hard Drive Stats for Q1 2017

Megalith

24-bit/48kHz
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The backup company’s latest hard drive report is mildly more amusing than usual, as their systems now include a significant number of enterprise drives. Unfortunately, it is still too early to comment on their failure rates, but some obvious benefits include faster data loading, even when certain power management features were engaged. Again, there are charts demonstrating how the usual Seagates, WDs, Toshibas, and HGSTs fared.

Backblaze has now recorded and saved daily hard drive statistics from the drives in our data centers for over 4 years. This data includes the SMART attributes reported by each drive, along with related information such as the drive serial number and failure status. As of March 31, 2017 we had 84,469 operational hard drives. Of that there were 1,800 boot drives and 82,669 data drives. For our review, we remove drive models of which we have less than 45 drives, leaving us to analyze 82,516 hard drives for this report. There are currently 17 different hard drives models, ranging in size from 3 to 8 TB in size. All of these models are 3½” drives.
 
The backblaze reports are great and it makes sense to add enterprise drives when a models price drops.
 
They say that for their use-case the extra data loading speed doesn't matter. However, 40% speed increase (in low-power mode) is significant for most end users, I would think. Anyone have numbers/projections on the increase if they hadn't turned on the power saving? I'm actually looking at making a data repository at work for cold storage and would be interested in that.
 
I have that bad feeling that this [thread] is going to get ugly like they have in the past. Hopefully everyone can be remotely civil. :cool:
 
My major complaint is they sort by size and not failure rate. Seems stupid to me when we all know everyone is looking at the chart for failure rate.

People are drawing conclusions from the data I don't like! The data can't be contorted to support MY conclusion!

THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!

Usually when I read backblaze it's more like "geez, i wonder why their data doesn't correlate to my own anecdotal experience combined with the anecdotal experience of my friends who work in IT". For example, I don't know a single person who trusts Seagate but for a while, Backblaze was loving Seagate drives because some short run data of theirs was looking pretty favorable. Now their short run data is looking exactly how I would expect... (being a bit sarcastic here since 35% annualized failure rate is obviously a little high)
 
I think it is great they give you the raw data so that you can look at it how ever you would like to.
 
Well my data lines up with theirs, my Seagate 4TB drives had a 100% failure rate. HGST has been by far my most reliable drives with Toshiba in 2nd place. Havent had a great run from WD either with 2 enterprise drives failing.
 
Purchased 4/28/2014.
WD1003FBYZ WD RE
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I love this drive.
 
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