Backblaze Releases Billion-Hour Hard Drive Reliability Report (extremetech.com) 130
jones_supa writes: The storage services provider Backblaze has released its reliability report for Q1/2016 covering cumulative failure rates of mechanical hard disk drives by specific model numbers and by manufacturer. The company noted that as of this quarter, its 60,000 drives have cumulatively spun for over one billion hours (100,000 years). Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) is the clear leader here, with an annual failure rate of just 1% for three years running. The second position is also taken by a Japanese company: Toshiba. Third place goes to Western Digital (WD), with the company's ratings having improved in the past year. Seagate comes out the worst, though it is suspected that much of that rating was warped by the company's crash-happy 3 TB drive (ST3000DM001). Backblaze notes that 4 TB drives continue to be the sweet spot for building out its storage pods, but that it might move to 6, 8, or 10 TB drives as the price on the hardware comes down.
Japanese? Not anymore. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Japanese? Not anymore. (Score:1)
so if Ford bought Honda would it make it Japanese I think so?
Re: (Score:1)
I really think so.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There's a difference between buying a stake in a company and buying out the whole company. Ford bought a stake in Mazda a while back, and co-developed some vehicles and platforms with them; they no longer have any ownership now however and the two are completely separate. This is rather different from one company completely buying out another company and merging them together (or just killing off the acquisition).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's still run as a separate company though, with engineers and design in Japan and manufacturing in Japan and I think Malasia.
HGST is owned by WD, but they are not the same drives or engineering.
Re: (Score:3)
I've got some bad news [tomsitpro.com] for you. MOFCOM has approved a full integration of the two companies, so (1) the HGST brand will disappear, and (2) all that HGST tradition of reliability is headed sraight down the crapper.
MOFCOM in 2012 at the time of the merger approval "restricted the two companies to a 'hold separate' ..., which prevented the companies from combining products and wor
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Japanese? Not anymore. (Score:5, Informative)
Several countries objected to the HGST and WD merger since it would leave only two manufacturers of 3.5" HDDs (WD and Seagate). So to push the merger through, HGST agreed to sell its 3.5" assets to Toshiba (which until then only made 2.5" HDDs) so we would have three manufacturers of 3.5" HDDs
Re: (Score:1)
Still somewhat wrong.
Toshiba didn't make 3.5" consumer drives before. They already had the MGxx enterprise nearline series which are descendants of a Fujitsu design.
They now also have a consumer series based on that line.
DT01ABA/ACA = e300/p300 = Toshitachi. DT01ACA100 / DT01ABA100 started out literally identical to Deskstar 7K1000.D / 5K1000.B until they changed the manufacturer/model string - yet to this day they still haven't bothered to change even the FW rev#.
MD04ACA = x300 = Toshijitsu. MD04ACA500 is
Re: (Score:1)
Probably because, as explained in the report, they buy their disks in batches of 5000 to 10000 at at time.
I suppse WD can deliver reds in those quantities, but not red pros?
And price may come into the question too. At those quantities, it may be cheaper to replace 100 more drives than to buy longer lasting models.
Re: (Score:3)
Makes them a pretty good value among providers of offsite backup/cold-ish storage; but they have a very limited interest in paying for more reliability at the hardware level, since that would fairly quickly push them into the domain of traditional storage vendors who use more expensive hardware to provide fault toleran
That webpage (Score:2, Informative)
Good god! opening that webpage is like walking trough treacle. I had to turn on Ghostery - 25 trackers!!
Re: (Score:1)
"The company that owns Ghostery, Ghostery, Inc. (previously Evidon), plays a dual role in the online advertising industry. Ghostery blocks marketing companies from gathering website user information, but it makes money from selling page visit, blocking and advertising statistics to corporations globally, including corporations that are actively engaged in collecting user information to target ads and other marketing messages to consumers."
Fighting evil with evil, nice.
In case ExtremeTech is listening (Score:2)
Not very useful (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
You say not very useful and then point out that they provide all the stats needed to get all required information about the usefulness, and then also go on to say that there are several models with some really large data sets.
This is the very opposite of "not very useful".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hardly. Look at their published datasets. They have more than enough data to paint a picture about a company on the whole. Now as for specific models you are right, there are a few drives where they have too few models to draw an accurate picture.
Amazing how bad Seagate management is (Score:2, Troll)
Not only have Seagate chained themselves to the declining HDD market, apparently happy with their inevitable fate of oblivion, but they can't even get that right! Their HDDs are totally crap as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Not only have Seagate chained themselves to the declining HDD market, apparently happy with their inevitable fate of oblivion, but they can't even get that right! Their HDDs are totally crap as well.
And they continue to sell because they are "good enough" and cheap enough, and because they are easy to buy in quantity. This is why BackBlaze does not buy as many Toshiba or WD drives... Getting them in quantity is difficult.
Actual link to report (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/ [backblaze.com]
It includes historical models as well as statistical confidence intervals - very useful for determining which model drive is more reliable. I know everyone wants to use an easy rule like "Seagate bad" when buying, but it's not that simple. Each new model of drive includes new design changes to try to increase capacity, improve speed and reliability, and/or reduce cost. Sometimes these design changes work, sometimes they don't and the model is less reliable (e.g. Samsung 840 EVO). The statistics have the greatest orthogonality when broken down by model, not by manufacturer.
Re: (Score:3)
Terrible Data Table (Score:2)
So they label the data table as being for the first quarter 2016, but then for some inexplicable reason they change the failure rate to be annual? Are they using historical or projected data? Why skew the failure rate?
And then the bar graph - failure rates by manufacturer. How are they getting this data? For example, 2016 for HGST they list a failure rate of 1.03%, but that isn't borne out in the table data. The table data suggests only a 0.2% failure rate (44 failures / 22731 drives).
Re: (Score:3)
The different drives have been in operation for different lengths of time. So they have to normalize the failure rate to an annual number in order to compare. e.g. If a drive model has been in use for 3 years, you just give the number of failures in the last year. If a drive model has been in use for 3 months, you multiply its failure rate by 4 to get
HGST best, Seagate worst - again! (Score:2)
This is NOT the first report in which HGST hard drives resulted to be the most reliable, and very much not the first report where Seagate came dead last in reliability. In fact Seagate's unreliability is becoming legendary.
Re: (Score:2)
Seagate HHDs unreliability is so legendary, in fact, that they should partner up with Old Spice. [youtube.com]
never had a hard drive fail on me (Score:1)
not even once, and i run seagates everywhere and even an old maxtor 80gig drive on a 2002 desktop i use for torrenting, then again all have a fan for cooling and none use those fancy alternate power states in which the computer isnt on, but isnt off either, im not a faggot here, i like women with big titties and binary power states
but if you are running a seagate 3tb drive thats a monstrosity with 4 plates and 5 heads or whatever, or a model thats been on the market for 2 months and you love to put it to sl
Less than useful (Score:2)
This data is only for a 91 day period. To actually be useful, data should be presented for a rolling 6M, 1Y, 2Y and 3Y periods of time, or at least for however long they keep drives in service. They should also include mean and median age of the group of drives. Perhaps Backblaze has that info elsewhere but nothing like it in the article.
Interesting trends (Score:3)
Aside from comments on specific models and specific manufacturers, has anyone else noticed the downward trend?
I wonder if this is due to more careful selection or (except in the case of Seagate which is quite obvious) the manufacturers are actually getting better, or age related issues in the way the stats are reported.
Anyone remember Maxtor? (Score:2)
You were lucky to get a year out of one of their drives.
Billion hour test (Score:2)
A billion hours is 114 thousand years
civilization didnt exist that long ago
at least on this planet
even if they tested a thousand drives for 114 years that would still be amazing. what sort of hard drives were around in 1902 ?
What about drive warranties? (Score:2)
I know it's a reliability report, but shouldn't drive warranties be considered?
If a drive is still under warranty, do I really care if it fails at time X versus 2*X? Rather than choosing a drive based on overall reliability, shouldn't I make the decision based on reliability after the warranty period has elapsed?
Yes, dealing with replacement costs more than buy (Score:2)
> If a drive is still under warranty, do I really care if it fails at time X versus 2*X?
I certainly do. Buying the drive costs maybe $130. Compare the cost to handle a failure:
Having a tech pull the pod, hook it up to the pod tester to find the bad drive, run that drive through the test sequence to prove (to the manufacturer) that it really is bad, fill out the RMA request, box it up and ship it, put a replacement drive in the pod, reinstall and activate the pod, handle receipt of new drive lat
Better Source (Score:3)
Re:Why does this matter? (Score:5, Informative)
It will affect you, if you ignore the results and choose to buy a Seagate drive. Trust me, I've been there...
Re:Why does this matter? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, I've been there. There's nothing quite like the sinking feeling you get when you first hear the "bird chirp" sound which is the first sign of impending catastrophic failure.
I had 3 of those drives fail in a 6 month period, all of them relatively new and only subjected to consumer-level usage. It got to the point where I was getting agitated every time there was birdsong outside my window. Seagate drives don't get anywhere near my home PC since then.
Re: Why does this matter? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
IIRC, the WD green drives had firmware issues - they were "green" because the FW would power them down prematurely in an effort to save energy, only to have them powered up again because the OS requested a read/write. Too many off/on cycles = premature failure.
Also, I must be lucky - I've had one Seagate failure in 12 years, and it was replaced under warranty. Small sample, admittedly - somewhere between 100 and 150 in domestic use.
Re: Why does this matter? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They also intentionally broke RAID functionality to force you to buy their more expensive drives. I used one or two in a RAID anyway after correcting all the firmware settings, but it still caused problems.
Re:Why does this matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it will affect you if you choose to ignore the results and buy a *3TB* Seagate drive.
When will people stop picking stupid manufacturer sides when it comes to drive reliability? It has nothing to do with manufacturers and everything to do with models. *Every* drive maker has put out shitty models that fail in dumb ways, from HGST (ex-IBM)'s DeathStars to Samsung's firmware fail (I still own a bunch of HD204UIs with an unfixed firmware bug that eats data if you dare use SMART self-tests) to Seagate's 3TB failures. Picking manufacturer sides just means you'll get hit whenever they make the next broken drive.
If you actually look at their per-drive stats, you'll see that Seagate's 4TB drive is, so far, *more* reliable than WD's current drives. I have a bunch of those and they're mostly running fine - though I had one drop off the controller last weekend (came back after reboot), first failure in years, I need to look into that. We'll see. Right now, 4TB Seagates seem to be the best bang per buck with decent reliability. Next year it might be another brand/drive.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. Of the (only) 100 desktops I deal with, exactly one had a 3TB Seagate, and it failed.
Re: (Score:2)
When will people stop picking stupid manufacturer sides when it comes to drive reliability?
When people stop continuing to get tons of anecdotal evidence. I was refurbishing some old storage boxes, and testing all the drives. Found about 10 bad out of 50. All the bad ones were Seagate. (Farious sizes and models.) None of the WD were bad. This reinforces my belief that Seagate is likely to be crap. It works the same way for others.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I will resist the impulse to shout "hey, stupid". If you even bothered to glance at the small table in the report, you would see that no Seagate 3 TB at all were covered. But the ST4000DX000 4 TB (5 failures, 9.63% failure rate) and ST4000DM000 4 TB (198 failures, 2.54% failure rate) were.
Re: (Score:3)
They were still using 3TB Seagates in their last report (Q4 2015) [backblaze.com]. They discontinued all use of them as a result of their findings.
Re: (Score:2)
Yup, they don't have any Seagate 3TB drives this time around... because they were so bad they ditched them all late last year. Meanwhile, as you mention, the ST4000DM000 (at 2.54% failure, sample size 34k drives) is doing better than the WD drives. The ST4000DX000 stat is not statistically significant, as they don't have many of those drives.
Re: (Score:2)
When will people stop picking stupid manufacturer sides when it comes to drive reliability? It has nothing to do with manufacturers and everything to do with models.
Completely disagree. Of course there are variations between models made by the same company, but it's the company's Big Bosses that decide on the margins and upper limits on tolerances and failures. If HGST is content with a 20% profit margin but Seagate expect 30% and both companies sell in the same segment, that extra 10% has to come from somewhere. Perhaps by using cheaper electrical components on the control board or more lax quality controls -- more likely some combination. That's the difference.
Re: Why does this matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are buying drives to use as the boot volume for computers that only get a single HDD, or even systems with small RAID arrays, you are going to be seriously inconvenienced by drive models that drop dead atypically fast, even if you save a few bucks upfront. Re-imaging a replacement drive or swapping out a failed RAID disk and rebuilding the volume take time and trouble.
If your purposes are very similar to theirs, then your sensitivity to failure is lower and getting a slightly better deal per GB might start to make sense; but you have to be pretty failure insensitive(or the price of reliability really steep) to be in the same boat.
Is cheaper really better? (Score:2)
Does it really pay off in the long-run to buy lower quality drives?
For example, a 5400 RPM 4 TB WD Blue (desktop) drive is $130 with a 2-year warranty. The 4 TB WD Gold (datacenter) is $264 with a 5-year warranty, but spins faster and has twice as much cache. The more expensive drive is slightly cheaper per warranty-year and provides more IOPS, but does draw almost 4 Watts more power when active.
Without knowing how long the drives last beyond their warranty period, which the Backblaze report doesn't men
Re: (Score:2)
I haven't bothered to look into Backblaze and exactly how they work, but if your business is all about providing the cheapest mass storage possible by using cheap drives in big RAID arrays, most likely the double-priced drive is a worse deal because it costs twice as much, and the extra performance isn't that important to you. In a massive array, it's going to get replaced when it dies, so you're not worried about risk because redundancy handles that. Plus the extra power consumption is going to cost you.
Re:Is cheaper really better? (Score:5, Informative)
If you are interested in details of our redundancy, here is a blog post about our "Vaults": https://www.backblaze.com/blog... [backblaze.com]
Summary of article: Backblaze uses Reed-Solomon coding across 20 computers in 20 locations in our datacenter. It is a 17 data drive plus 3 parity configuration, so we can lose any 3 entire pods in 3 separate racks in our datacenter and the data is still completely intact and available.
Re: (Score:2)
By chance do you guys sell the hardware for the storage boxes? I would love to have one of these in my house.
Re: (Score:2)
You are in luck! Backblaze does NOT sell the hardware, but we give the design away entirely for free (and others sell it unassembled or assembled for a tiny markup). You can review the latest design here including downloading schematics and specs and parts lists to assemble your own: https://www.backblaze.com/blog... [backblaze.com]
It sounds like you only want one, and you may not want to worry about assembling it yourself, so you should definitel
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you, that is exactly what I was looking for.
Re:Is cheaper really better? (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: Brian from Backblaze here. We use a fairly small, simple spreadsheet to answer that exact question. If Drive A is the same size as Drive B but fails 1% more often, then we might choose the drive that fails at a higher rate if is 2% cheaper, and if it is 10% cheaper it is a slam dunk. Make sense?
You ask about warranty. We enter the warranty information into the simple spreadsheet. If a warranty is 5 years long, then replacement drives are free during that time. If the failure rate is 1% per year, then that warranty is worth exactly 5% to us. If a drive with no warranty at all is 10% cheaper, then it is cheaper. If the drive with no warranty is 2% cheaper then we purchase the drive with the warranty.
In reality, the simple spreadsheet has a few more categories. For example, an 8 TByte Hard Drive takes half the datacenter space rental as two 4 TByte drives and the 8 TByte drive takes about half the electricity of the two 4 TByte drives. So if they were the same price we would obviously choose the 8 TByte drive. But they aren't the same price, so the additional cost of the 8 TByte drive has to be recovered over three years of reduced cabinet space rental costs and reduced electricity costs. We purchase drives once per month, so we get 20 bids from our cheapest suppliers, and right now SOME months Backblaze ends up purchasing the 8 TByte drives because they will pay for themselves within 3 years, and some months we go back to the 4 TByte drives because they are so ridiculously cheap it would take 7 years for the 8 TByte drives to pay for themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I'd rather have two of the $130 drives in RAID1, vs. the $264 drive. Then buy a cup of coffee.
I just experienced the first drive failure ever, since getting my first 20MB Winchester hard drive in the 80s. Fortunately it happened while testing before using as temp. storage to allow repartitioning another drive. Granted, my drives have only ever seen "desktop" workloads.
Re: Why does this matter? (Score:4, Informative)
They buy Seagate because Seagate will allow them to do volume purchases.
It's a bit easier to go to your local Best Buy and get one or two drives of whatever manufacturer you want then to buy 10,000 drives in a single order. The article specifically says that WD and Toshiba haven't been able to get that done, where Hitachi and Seagate have.
Re:Why does this matter? (Score:5, Informative)
Can anyone tell me how this affects anyone? A billion hours is a ridiculous amount of time that makes this irrelevant to any reasonable person. No one cares if a hard drive lasts a billion hours.
I suggest you look at the definition of the word "cumulatively".
Here is a hint: divide 1,000,000,000 by the 60,000 HDD of the report, this makes 16,667 hours which is approximately 2 years.
Re:Why does this matter? (Score:5, Informative)
It's how statistics work.
There are over 7 billion people on the planet divided among 100 or so ethnicities and about 200 countries. If you're trying to determine the demographics of the world, checking only 10 random people will not give you any meaningful data. Checking a million random people, on the other hand, will give you a fairly good idea of the demographics of the world.
Same with hard drives. Statistics on 5 hard drives won't tell you anything about the likelihood of a 6th drive failing. Statistics on 100,000 drives will.
Re: (Score:3)
If you randomly select drives from a population than it absolutely does tell you something about the unsampled units. Obviously they don't run their drives for one hour an then retire them.
Re: (Score:1)
This is the most wrong reply I've seen on Slash this week, kudos!
Re: (Score:3)
You must be one of those the chance of winning the lottery is 50:50, you either win or you don't people.
A long analysis of statistics of 100000 drives most definitely gives you information about the 100001th drive when it's in a population group compared to another population group.
Build a drive that self destructs after 2 hours, run a billion of them for 1 hour ... billion hours of time with no failures!!!!!!
Your absurd abuse of statistics would give very valuable insight into the assembly process and QA process of a manufacturer. This would produce very valuable information despite your attempt to show it's worthless, especially sin
Re: (Score:2)
If I have 3 women have a baby, it will get done in 3 months.
MS Project told me so.
Re: (Score:2)
Another person who doesn't understand data.
If 3 women have a baby and all end up the same you known nothing. If two of them miscarry in those three months, you learn a hell of a lot without ever getting a baby. You don't need to run every life to failure to learn something from statistics.
Well you do if you can't understand statistics, ... I recommend you do your master's thesis on mayflys, otherwise you'll never get done.
Re: (Score:2)
"Another person who does not understand sarcasm."
Fixed that for you.
Re: (Score:2)
Sarcasm is easily understood when the context or the content alludes to it.
You're communicating using a form where 90% of the context is absent. I can't hear the tone of your voice, I can't see your facial expressions, and I just finished dealing with someone who had absolutely no idea. Hence your reply looked like just another person who had no clue.
In order to communicate sarcasm you need to actually communicate it. Someone failing to understand it is a symptom of a filed communication.
But no one on Slash
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the phrase "MS project told me so" was sort a huge fucking clue mate. Unless you are insulting my intelligence by thinking that was a serious comment.
So was the fact that "2 women can't make a baby in half the time" is a well known axiom about the futility of trying to shorten the timeline of a single threaded task.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless you are insulting my intelligence by thinking that was a serious comment
I was just talking to someone who had no fucking clue at all. So... yes I actually took a good chunk of your comment seriously.
But again. Communication is a two way street and maybe I'm just a complete and utter idiot who takes everyone's word as literal. You would be wise to remember someone could always confuse what you're saying especially in an impersonal context free communication medium.
is a well known axiom
And to extend on this I've never heard this before. Not all slashdotters are programmers. ... well not yet ... accor
Re: (Score:2)
YOU don't understand how statistics ACTUALLY work.
You don't seem to understand. The whole point of statistics is to give predictive power. If you can't predict what the 100,001st drive will probably do, then you're not using statistics.
Re: (Score:2)
If there was ever a website that needed a "-1, Objectively Wrong" moderation option, it's Slashdot.
Re: (Score:2)
seeing the sun rise in the east every day for the last few thousand years of human recorded history tells us nothing about what'll happen tomorrow!
When you look a little closer and have enough data points, you'll find that the sun doesn't rise in the same exact place every day. The position varies over a cycle of about 365.25 days. You can indeed see that pattern with hundreds of thousands of data points. You cannot see it with 10.
Thanks for proving my point, even if you were being an ass in the process.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And, when it comes to reliability analysis, that 'ridiculous amount of time' is enormously helpful. How else are you going to draw statistically significant conclusions about something with such an element of chance?
Re: (Score:1)
That's what they call 'disk nearline storage'. MAID arrays. :)
I also remember that RAID originally stood for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks", not for "top-of-the-line SCSI moneyburners"
Re:ST3000DM001? In a DATA CENTER? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever price out "enterprise" drives?
When you're buying 10 drives, you pay the premium because man-hours to deal with failures are expensive. When you're buying 10,000? Not so much because failures are built into the design at that scale.
At the scale Backblaze operates, it's cheaper to build redundant systems that can handle consumer drive failures and just buy twice as many drives.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They are bad drives for sure, but they are not exactly using 90's raid tech either. It's distributed mirrors the OS just sees a JBOD and higher levels deal with making copies etc. Looking at their hardware spec they are not realy worried about performance with a lot of sata port multipliers. But their industry is write it twice and probably never access it again outside of bitrot detection and correcting for failures.
Re: (Score:2)
What the fuck is this company doing using consumer hard drives in a goddamn data center?
Making lots money while still offering services cheaper then anyone else. Their B2 storage is even cheaper then Amazon S3. Yet, the service overall is very reliable, and the customers seem very happy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:ST3000DM001? In a DATA CENTER? (Score:5, Informative)
Brian from Backblaze here. You assume we use RAID (inside of one computer), which is incorrect. We wrote our own layer where any one piece of data is Reed Solomon encoding across 20 different computers in 20 different locations in our datacenter (which is using some of the excellent ideas from RAID and ditching some of the parts that don't work well in our particular application). Our encoding happens to be 17 data drives plus 3 parity. We can make our own decisions about what to do with timeouts. When doing reads, we ask all 20 computers for their piece, and THE FIRST 17 THAT RETURN are used to calculate the answer. Now if one of the computers does not respond at all we send a data center tech to replace it. But if it was just momentarily slow a few times a day we let it be (we don't eject it from the Reed Solomon Group).
> These drives are only meant to be powered on a few hours a day and consumer workload duty cycles
I think a really interesting study would be to power a few thousand drives up once per day for an hour and shut them down. Compare it to a control group of the same drives left on so their temperature did not fluctuate. See which ones last longer without failure. I honestly don't have the answer. (Really, I don't.) What I do know is that Backblaze has left 61,590 hard drives continuously spinning, most of these are often labeled as "consumer drives", and that the vast majority of drives last so long that we copy the data off onto massively more dense drives (like copying all the data off a 1 TByte drive into an 8 TByte drive) not because the 1 TByte fails, but because it ECONOMICALLY MAKES SENSE. An 8 TByte drive takes less electricity per TByte, takes 1/8th the rack space rental, etc. So Backblaze honestly wouldn't care if the "Enterprise Drives" lasted 10x as long in our environment-> we would STILL replace them at the same moment.
Re: (Score:1)
Oh yeah, guess wut?
They think Nefertit's tomb is hidden behind a wall in King Tut's burial chamber.
You know what they will find, bro?
They're gonna find a fucking NETWARE 3.12 server. That's what. ANd it's gonna be running on a bank of BAGHDAD BATTERIES. And it's gonna have full-height 5.25 SEAGATE CHEETAS. And they're gonna be NOISY. And ALL this will MAKE servers GREAT AGAIN. And the PEOPLE will REJOICE and MICROSOFT will DIE.
Re: (Score:2)
Drives usually fail on power cycle so i'm not surprised.
I dare you to reboot it and see if any of the drives come back up.
Still thats an impressive uptime. So impressive that its not likely true. Power failures happen once every 10 years at the least in most places. UPS batteries die every 3 years. Generators fail in weird ways (i had one start delivering only 80v consistently as the voltage regulator was going out).