Hard Drive Stats For Q3 2016: Less Is More

[Megalith]

Backblaze is back with new reliability stats. I would think that any broad conclusions are debatable due to inconsistency of disk counts between manufacturers despite posted failure rate percentages, but the company does point out that the 8TB Seagates they have adopted seem promising.

The Seagate 8 TB drives are doing very well. Their annualized failure rate compares favorably to the HGST 2 TB hard drives. With the average age of the HGST drives being 66 months, their failure rate was likely to rise, simply because of normal wear and tear. The average age of the Seagate 8 TB hard drives is just 3 months, but their 1.6% failure rate during the first few months bodes well for a continued low failure rate going forward.

 

[nutzo]

Disappointed to see the failure rate for the WD 6TB red drives (11.31%). That's worse than the Seagate 4TB drives.
Could be due to them installing the drives in large raid systems, since the drives are designed for 6 drives or less NAS units and can't handle the excessive vibrations of large numbers of drives.

I have 10 of them in a backup server, and so far they have been good.

The Seagate 8TB drive number look good for now, but give them a while and I'd expect them to fail like other Seagate drives.

 

[DedEmbryonicCe11]

Disappointed to see the failure rate for the WD 6TB red drives (11.31%). That's worse than the Seagate 4TB drives.
Could be due to them installing the drives in large raid systems, since the drives are designed for 6 drives or less NAS units and can't handle the excessive vibrations of large numbers of drives.

I have 10 of them in a backup server, and so far they have been good.

I've been thinking about buying the 6TB Red Pro myself and I hope the same failure rate doesn't apply to those.

 

[Phelptwan]

My 3tb reds have just started failing on me as I'm switching to 6tb ironwolfs. I'm down 2/16 right now that have been in service for about 3 years I think.

 

[collegeboy69us]

Just got a drobo 5c and stocked it with a mix of my existing drives (6 to 4TB) I dropped in a brand new 8TB WD Red, hope it lasts... was tempted to pick up one more anr round out my useable storage to 20TB on the array.


Actually have a seagate 8TB external that uses the SMR recording. Been storing all my HD rips there, seems pretty solid enough. Only continuing to use it external because apparently it's a big no no to drop those in a raid type setup.

I've run a mix of Western Digital and Seagate and I've had absolutely zero issues with either.