![]() ![]() ![]() A group of engineers and enthusiasts from the USA founded Backblaze in 2007 year. The challenge many end users are facing is how to choose the most reliable hard disk drive from the dozens of different brands and hundreds of different hard drive models.Ī study conducted by cloud-based online backup tool Backblaze might help you to make the right decision. Any drive you buy today will fail eventually, but the more reliable your drive is, the longer you should be able to use it (though you should still be backing up your data regularly!). After all, when you’re choosing your hard drive, you’re deciding where and how to keep your data as safe as possible. To that end we have changed Hitachi to HGST in this post and in the graph.Considering your priceless memories and career-enabling information can be stored on a single drive, you can probably benefit from a better understanding of different hard drive brands and what you can expect from them. Notesĩ-30-2014 – We were nicely asked by the folks at HGST to replace the name Hitachi with the name HGST given that HGST is no longer an Hitachi company. While the failure rate of Seagate and Western Digital 3 TB hard drives has started to rise, most of the consumer-grade drives in the Backblaze data center are continuing to perform well, and are a cost-effective way to provide unlimited online backup at a good price. The Barracuda 7200.11 is having problems, but the Barracuda LP is doing well. There is a similar pattern with the Seagate 1.5TB drives. The Barracuda 7200.14 is having problems, but the Barracuda XT is doing well with less than half the failure rate. We use two different models of Seagate 3TB drives. Number of Hard Drives by Model at Backblaze A couple of models are new to Backblaze and show a failure rate of “n/a” because there isn’t enough data yet for reliable numbers. It includes all drive models that we have at least 200 of. This table shows the detailed breakdown of how many of which drives we have, how old they are on average, and what the failure rate is. I analyzed both of these types of drives in our system and found that their failure rates in our environment were very similar - with the “consumer” drives actually being slightly more reliable.ĭetailed Reliability of Hard Drive Models The assumption that “enterprise” drives would work better than “consumer” drives has not been true in our tests.However, even if there were no warranty, a 15% annual failure rate on the consumer “desktop” drive and a 0% failure rate on the “enterprise” drive, the breakeven would be 10 years, which is longer than we expect to even run the drives for. Most of the drives we get have a 3-year warranty, making failures a non-issue from a cost perspective for that period. Today on Amazon, a Seagate 3 TB “enterprise” drive costs $235 versus a Seagate 3 TB “desktop” drive costs $102.Should we switch to enterprise drives?Īssuming we continue to see a failure rate of 15% on these drives, would it make sense to switch to “enterprise” drives instead? We’ll continue to monitor and report on how these drives perform in the future. Or it could be that getting them by drive farming and removing them from external USB enclosures caused problems. It may be that those drives are less well-suited to the data center environment. But the Seagate and Western Digital 3.0 TB drives failure rates are up quite a bit. You can see that all the HGST (formerly Hitachi) drives, the Seagate 1.5 TB and 4.0 TB, and Western Digital 1.0 TB drives are all continuing to perform as well as they were before. In the chart below, the grey bars are the failure rates up through the end of 2013, and the colored bars are the failure rates including all of the data up through the end of June, 2014. The Western Digital 3TB drives have also failed more, with their rate going up from 4% to 7%. The surprising (and bad) news is that Seagate 3.0TB drives are failing a lot more, with their failure rate jumping from 9% to 15%. The good news is that the chart today looks a lot like the one from January, and that most of the drives are continuing to perform well. We carefully track which drives are doing well and which are not, to help us when selecting new drives to buy. ![]() Even so, we still try to avoid failing drives, because replacing them costs money. When a drive fails, it is promptly replaced, and its data is restored. Every file we back up is replicated across multiple drives in the data center. Losing a disk drive at Backblaze is not a big deal. This month I’m updating those numbers and sharing some surprising new findings. I did a blog post back in January, called “What Hard Drive Should I Buy?” It covered the reliability of each of the drive models that we use. We continually track how our disk drives are doing, which ones are reliable, and which ones need to be replaced. At Backblaze we now have 34,881 drives and store over 100 petabytes of data. ![]()
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