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Data Storage

Backblaze Uncovers the Most Reliable Hard Drives (zdnet.com) 40

Posted by BeauHD from the reliability-is-key dept.
Backblaze, a cloud storage service that's been running hundreds of thousands of storage drives to keep an eye on reliability, has issued its latest report. ZDNet summarizes the major findings: Over 2021, Backblaze added 40,460 hard drives to its pool of drives, making a total of 206,928 drives in total. Of thee, 3,760 are boot drives and 203,168 are data drives. There's a lot of information in the report to look at, but there are two standout parts from the report:

- The oldest drive is the most reliable: 6TB Seagate drives (model: ST6000DX000) have an average age of 80.4 months (almost seven years) yet incredibly these also have the lowest annualized failure rate (AFR) of 0.11 percent.
- Newer drives are also doing really well: 16TB WDC drives (model: WUH721816ALE6L0) and 16TB Toshiba drives (model: MG08ACA16TE) were both added in 2021, and have an AFR of 0.14 and 0.91 percent, respectively.

Backblaze had also been experiencing problems with the 14TB Seagate drives (model: ST14000NM0138) in its Dell storage servers. It seems that following a firmware update the reliability of these drives has improved dramatically. Further reading: Seagate HDDs Top and Bottom Backblaze's 2021 Failure Rates Data (Tom's Hardware)
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Backblaze Uncovers the Most Reliable Hard Drives More

Backblaze Uncovers the Most Reliable Hard Drives

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  • What's a hard drive? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Asking for a friend.

  • What? "To keep an eye on reliability"? Was this written by a 3rd grader? You know they actually have a product, right? This is just something they do on the side..

    • It isn't a particularly dexterous or sesquipedalian palabra, in fact it is rather pauciloquent.

      What is the cause of your multiloquent onomatophobia, dear usageaster?

  • I have to say that over the years I have really enjoyed these reports from Backblaze... even though with spinning platter hard drives it seems like they are very YMMV it's still nice to have odds a bit more on your side when purchasing drives.

    I just wish I could find a regular and reliable report for HD noise (about as well as a description along the lines of "high pitched", "irregular", "sawmill", etc), as over the years some models have been pretty bad noise wise.

    • Yeah, given they're putting these in their datacenters... probably needs to be someone else!

      "We installed these drives, and the place was still incredibly noisy. Our ears are still ringing."

      Unfortunately you can't rely on the customer reviews either - I've seen one person claim a drive was really noisy, followed by another talking about how quiet it was.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Chas ( 5144 )

        The BB reports are good for one thing. Selecting drives for DURABILITY.
        If a drive can survive in one of those hard drive torture chambers they call storage pods, they're likely MORE than good enough for an end user machine.

        Sitting with 4 enterprise WD drives in my NAS. During extended bulk writes, they can get noisy.
        But for the most part, I could sleep with the unit next to my head and never have a problem.

        Though that could just mean I'm dangerously narcoleptic...

        • Hey, that's an idea - a bedside sound machine for tech geeks. Some of the sound choices:

          - Whirring hard drives
          - GPU fan spinning up like a jet engine
          - Clacking of a mechanical keyboard
          - Tape carousel cycling between cartridges
          - Loop of Steve Ballmer shouting "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!" (Linux people can listen sardonically, Windows people listen rapturously)
          - Munching Cheetos

          • https://youtu.be/7c8hPex4IOc [youtu.be] (All The Machines by Grace Slick - 1984) (with modem sounds)

            I wish somebody would post the soundtrack to the book Netslaves, but it seems to have disappeared from the internet. (!) (??!!)

            I still have a few of the tracks, they're a lot of fun.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Chas ( 5144 )

            Like ASMR for hardware nerds...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        The other problem is retailers often treat hard drives like crap.

        There are ways to transport a hard drive around, and ways to NOT transport a hard drive around. The wrong treatment of a hard drive can easily lead to premature failure.

        Some retailers have shipped bare hard drives bundled together then a layer of bubblewrap. The drives banged against each other while being shipped around, and by the time they got to the final user, 8 of the 10 drives were reporting disk errors. Brand new sealed drives.

        And thes

    • Every time I've taken a close look at these reports, one thing I noticed is that every manufacturer has good models and bad. Which is a bit inconvenient - you can't just remember which brands are best. You have to look at specific models.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Chas ( 5144 )

        It's not that tough.

        Figure out what capacity you're looking for.
        Then find the most reliable drives in that range.

        • Doesn't work. Many of "most reliable" are particular models which may no longer be available.

          eg The "6TB Seagate drives (model: ST6000DX000)" has been very reliable for 80 months. 80 months is over six years, good luck buying a new one.

          This year's 6TB Seagate may suck. You simply won't know until a few years from now.

      • Re:Always good and bad models (Score:5, Insightful)

        by aRTeeNLCH ( 6256058 ) on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @11:32AM (#62230619)
        True, but never forget the old adage that hard drives have three states: new, full, or broken. Sure, the second point hasn't been true since at least the multi terabyte drives, but the big takeaway is: take into account that no types of drive, size or brand, have 0% fails. This report confirms that, and after that, whether 0.11% of the drive type you have fails, or 0.5% or even 5%, doesn't really matter for the handful you may have at home.

    • Yeah, going by anecdotes is completely pointless as everyone is going to have a horror story where they lost all the childhood photos in a disk failure of brand XYZ. Their survey is pretty much the only source I've found that has some sort of objective, statistically significant reliability metrics.

      Of course even buying the most reliable drive can fail on you so you always have to back up the important stuff. But so far I've had success, I bought an 4TB HGST drive like 5 years ago based on their survey and

  • Yes - likley this is a cost/TB issue, but I'm wondering what solid data like this is out there for SSDs?

    This is from the Backblaze blog
    https://www.backblaze.com/blog... [backblaze.com]

    looks like the SSDs are slightly more reliable than the mechanical HDDs. I would think with time the SSDs are more likely to be stable, but realistically, who's keeping a drive more than 7 years on a home computer

    I'll imagine that SSDs will continue to make more rapid improvements than HDDs as they are a newer tech. I certainly could do w

    • but realistically, who's keeping a drive more than 7 years on a home computer

        $ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Hours 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 086 086 000 Old_age Always - 101575

      That's 11.6 years.

      • I recently - in March 2021 - took down a linux box with an uptime dating to early in the second term of the Bush administration. It had been running for a while prior to that - I think the circa 2005 reboot was to replace a UPS that had failed.

        SMART had fixed a few sectors in 2013. I had driven it (on a big UPS) ~50 miles a few months prior, which probably caused a write error, rather than a surface defect.

        In late 2020, it developed a few dozen uncorrectable errors, which gradually (over several months) w

        • I would upvote you, but I wss put on the "Never to ever again receive modpoints" blacklist after an anti-globohomo post a few years back.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Chas ( 5144 )

      Kioxia (Used to be Toshiba) makes BIG drives (up to 30TB).
      They're expensive as HELL though.
      And you usually need specialized hardware and specific BRANDS of specialized hardware to get stable performance.

      Taking out hardware crib death at the beginning of the bathtub curve, even with cell decay over time, the SSDs should be more stable.
      Once the chip shortage ends, and density begins increasing again, there should be some great "bang for the buck" stuff coming into retail space a short while after the market l

    • but realistically, who's keeping a drive more than 7 years on a home computer

      Are you asking about Slashdotters or real people? I don't think any of my family members have HDDs *newer* than 7 years old. Even my father during his last upgrade when he got an SSD in his PC kept his already at the time 6 year old drive with his data on it. That was 4 years ago.

      He does back it up regularly so bonus points to him.

  • I am surprised Western Digital has any drive with a low failure rate, usually their drives are the worst. I would guess that's why there's only two of them on the list.

    • They bought HGST, and the reliable WD drivers are the Ultrastar Helium line from Hitachi (that was originally IBM's drive division).

      I would never buy WD, but I've been buying HGST for a long time and never regretted it.

      • I would never buy WD,

        That report specifically says: "the manufacturer with the least amount of failures was WDC."

        (and honorable mentions to HGST, which is now under WD)

        • That report specifically says: "the manufacturer with the least amount of failures was WDC."

          Ok, minor clarification then: I would never buy the older (originally WD) line from WD; I will continue to buy the Ultrastars (inherited from HGST), which are the ones that Blackblaze uses in their data centers (and thus that are reported in those tests).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        You mean the IBM infamous for the "deathstar" drives. So apparently the division responsible for some of the most unreliable drives in history makes the best now. Right...

        The saner approach is that they all make bad models from time to time and ruling out one particular manufacture because of one or two bad models is dumb.

        • Agreed with the saner approach. And that is why I will buy WD soon. You shouldn’t rule out based on simple opinions, but you must consider available data.

          I had a bad experience with IBM; not because of reliability, but because of cost. I had a few bad experiences with WD drives. I never (!) had a bad experience with HGST (expected, given the fraction of failures in the Blackblaze report and the number of drives I work with).

          Wrt to specific manufacturers, just check how consistently all models of HGST

    • I am surprised Western Digital has any drive with a low failure rate, usually their drives are the worst. I would guess that's why there's only two of them on the list.

      Weird. I usually buy WD because I've never had one fail on me.

      • I've been mostly running WD since about 97 and I've never had a failure. Actually I still have a couple drives that I've had plugged in for almost 20 years, I just never quite finish copying all the files so I can unplug them...

        • FWIW: I've had failed Hitachis and Toshibas.

          • I've definitely seen failed Toshibas, though I've never purchased one so haven't had one fail.

            I did have a Hitachi that started making a weird sound, but it survived another week until replacement.

  • My Barracuda ST3000DM001 was bricked in just two years, with all the data beyond recover
  • It's a pity that these reports don't fall through a wormhole from the future. So you don't know a drive is worth its money until it's been out of production for years. Reminds me of the Volvo commercials that featured a model from the sixties with an average lifespan of 19 years. Unfortunately, this doesn't really say much about the products currently on sale.

    That is like driving by looking into the rear view mirror.

  • Looks like HGST is the best bet, with the good WDC having a very similar model to the HGSTs so possibly just rebranded. While the old Seagate is the best, their quality may have dropped so much as to not be a good bet anymore.

    Best AFRs:
    0.11 Seagate. 6TB sy6000dx000
    0.14 WDC.... 16TB wuh721816aLe6L0
    0.27 HGST... 12TB huh721212aLe600
    0.29 HGST... 12TB huh721212aLe604
    0.31 HGST.... 4TB hms5c4040bLe640

    Worst AFRs:
    4.79 Seagate 14TB st14000nm0138
    2.26 Seagate 10TB st10000nm0086
    2.04 Toshiba. 4TB md04aba400v

  • Toshiba? (Score:2)

    by rew ( 6140 )

    The mentioned 16T drives differ quite a lot with .14% and .91%. With an overall average of 1.01%, the .14% is quite good. Several times better than average.

    On the other hand, the .91% is "better than average" but "not by much".

    Are filesystems for 16T+ drives (and raids even larger) reliable yet?

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