Backblaze has released its data set for the full year 2018 and there are some surprises in it this time around. Annual failure rates for drives have fallen sharply in comparison with previous years as smaller-capacity HDDs have been replaced by higher-capacity counterparts. This isn’t automatically what you’d expect.
Backblaze, a backup company that currently stores over 1 exabyte of data. Western Digital, and Hitachi. But some drives are better than others even within those well-known brands. Western Digital had no 4TB drives in the running, but Backblaze used 6TB drives from the company's line, the Western Digital Red. Its failure stats were less than 5 percent for the course of the. Backblaze, a cloud storage provider, has more than 44,000 drives in its data centers. So it sees failures at a much higher rate than any of us. Western Digital also had a spotty performance.
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- Seagate Technology PLC (commonly referred to as Seagate) is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company is incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in.
The Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) has fallen every year since 2016, from 1.95 percent to 1.25 percent. That’s a significant decline. Importantly, while this trend doesn’t hold true for every drive family, there are multiple HDDs that show lower AFRs in 2018 than in 2016. Seagate’s 10TB drive family has been particularly good, with a 0.33 percent AFR for 2018, improving on the already-low 0.89 percent AFR for 2017.
For those of you wanting an AFR comparison that stretches back farther than 2016, Backblaze has provided that data as well. The following is the AFR rating for HDDs from 4/20/2013 through 12/31/2018 for all drives still active as of 12/31/2018.
HGST drives continue to impress as far as overall AFR rates and this isn’t the first year that’s been true. Overall, these are some of the most reliable drives over time that Backblaze has tested. The complete AFR rate over all five years is 1.68 percent — higher than the 2018 data alone, but still within a very reasonable window.
The Caveats
Backblaze Western Digital Seagate
I’ve written a version of this for every Backblaze post we do, so here’s the latest. Backblaze’s data set is not perfect. The company uses consumer drives in a decidedly enterprise context, which doesn’t remotely reflect the usage patterns these drives would receive if they were being used by an ordinary customer. It constructs and maintains its own storage pods and has iterated on these designs over time, often with improvements intended to reduce vibration or noise. This could also theoretically have an impact on drive reliability. As the video below illustrates, hard drives don’t like it when you scream at them. Always make certain to communicate with your spinning media in a thoughtful, calm voice.
The reason we continue to discuss and feature Backblaze’s data set is the same reason we refer to the Steam Hardware Survey. We know the data sets are imperfect — the SHS’s list of video cards doesn’t include multiple AMD GPUs like Vega 56 or 64 and only added the RX 570 last month. The total number of “Other” GPUs listed is 10.92 percent — more than enough to meaningfully impact the AMD versus Nvidia split listed at the top level of the page. But while these data sets are imperfect, they’re also the best window we have into an important question. HDD manufacturers do not release the kind of reliability information that HDD consumers often want and the handful of third-party studies on the topic frequently don’t identify drive vendors or models.
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It looks as if Hitachi has the lowest failure rate (best reliability) among all tested hard drive manufacturers, with WD performing second best, and Seagate performing worse than both its competitors combined (... and multiplied, twice).
Backblaze reports that hard drives tend to fail at either the 18 month or post-3-year marks. This isn't too surprising and is in-line with components across the industry. Interestingly, Backblaze even issued warranty replacements as drives failed, then tested the received units on their bench. The company notes:
'The Seagate Barracuda Green 1.5TB drive, though, has not been doing well. We got them from Seagate as warranty replacements for the older drives, and these new drives are dropping like flies. Their average age shows 0.8 years, but since these are warranty replacements, we believe that they are refurbished drives that were returned by other customers and erased, so they already had some usage when we got them.'
Backblaze Western Digital Login
| Number of Hard Drives by Model at Backblaze | ||||
| Model | Size | Number of Drives | Average Age in Years | Annual Failure Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seagate Desktop HDD.15 (ST4000DM000) | 4.0TB | 5199 | 0.3 | 3.8% |
| Hitachi GST Deskstar 7K2000 (HDS722020ALA330) | 2.0TB | 4716 | 2.9 | 1.1% |
| Hitachi GST Deskstar 5K3000 (HDS5C3030ALA630) | 3.0TB | 4592 | 1.7 | 0.9% |
| Seagate Barracuda (ST3000DM001) | 3.0TB | 4252 | 1.4 | 9.8% |
| Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 (HDS5C4040ALE630) | 4.0TB | 2587 | 0.8 | 1.5% |
| Seagate Barracuda LP (ST31500541AS) | 1.5TB | 1929 | 3.8 | 9.9% |
| Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 (HDS723030ALA640) | 3.0TB | 1027 | 2.1 | 0.9% |
| Seagate Barracuda 7200 (ST31500341AS) | 1.5TB | 539 | 3.8 | 25.4% |
| Western Digital Green (WD10EADS) | 1.0TB | 474 | 4.4 | 3.6% |
| Western Digital Red (WD30EFRX) | 3.0TB | 346 | 0.5 | 3.2% |
| Seagate Barracuda XT (ST33000651AS) | 3.0TB | 293 | 2.0 | 7.3% |
| Seagate Barracuda LP (ST32000542AS) | 2.0TB | 288 | 2.0 | 7.2% |
| Seagate Barracuda XT (ST4000DX000) | 4.0TB | 179 | 0.7 | n/a |
| Western Digital Green (WD10EACS) | 1.0TB | 84 | 5.0 | n/a |
| Seagate Barracuda Green (ST1500DL003) | 1.5TB | 51 | 0.8 | 120.0% |
Backblaze also statistically analyzed the rate at which each company's drives died, noting a higher initial failure rate for WD than either
With this data noted, it's generally a good idea to burn-in test your components upon receipt to ensure long-term reliability, as we've written before. For hard drives, using a tool like iometer or HD Tune (both with free versions) can help perform a burn-in test. Use one of these to root-out any rapidly-failing drives before committing important data to them.
Backblaze Western Digital Software
Read more of Backblaze's report here -- definitely interesting.
- Steve 'Lelldorianx' Burke.