Backblaze Probes Increased Annualized Failure Rate For Its 240,940 HDDs (arstechnica.com) 28
For over a decade, Backblaze's quarterly reports on the annualized failure rates (AFRs) of its substantial hard disk drives inventory have offered a peek into long-term storage utilization. The company, known for its backup and cloud storage services, has now disclosed data for the second quarter of 2023, revealing a fascinating rise in AFRs. ArsTechnica: Today's blog post details data for 240,940 HDDs that Backblaze uses for data storage around the world. There are 31 different models, and Backblaze's Andy Klein, who authored the blog, estimated in an email to Ars Technica that 15 percent of the HDDs in the dataset, including some of the 4, 6, and 8TB drives, are consumer-grade. The dataset doesn't include boot drives, drives in commission for testing purposes, or drive models for which Backblaze didn't have at least 60 units. One of the biggest revelations from examining the drives from April 1, 2023, through June 30, 2023, was an increase in AFR from Q1 2023 (1.54 percent) to Q2 2023 (2.28 percent). Backblaze's Q1 dataset examined 237,278 HDDs across 30 models. Of course, that AFR increase alone isn't enough to warrant any panic.
Since quarterly AFR numbers are "volatile," Klein told Ars Technica, Backblaze further evaluates both quarter-to-quarter and lifetime trends "to see if what happened was an anomaly or something more." So, Klein started digging further by grouping the drives by capacity. This is because, as Klein explained to Ars: "A Backblaze storage vault consists of 1,200 drives of the same size, with 60 drives in 20 storage servers. If we grouped the drives strictly by age and wanted to replace just the oldest drives in a given Backblaze vault, we would only replace those drives in the vault that met the old age criteria, not all the drives. Then, a year from now, we'd do it again, and the year after that, etc. By using the average age by drive size, we can, as appropriate, replace/upgrade all of the drives in a vault at once."
Since quarterly AFR numbers are "volatile," Klein told Ars Technica, Backblaze further evaluates both quarter-to-quarter and lifetime trends "to see if what happened was an anomaly or something more." So, Klein started digging further by grouping the drives by capacity. This is because, as Klein explained to Ars: "A Backblaze storage vault consists of 1,200 drives of the same size, with 60 drives in 20 storage servers. If we grouped the drives strictly by age and wanted to replace just the oldest drives in a given Backblaze vault, we would only replace those drives in the vault that met the old age criteria, not all the drives. Then, a year from now, we'd do it again, and the year after that, etc. By using the average age by drive size, we can, as appropriate, replace/upgrade all of the drives in a vault at once."
Maybe it's Covid? (Score:4, Funny)
A bunch of countries are experiencing a markedly higher death rate after the pandemic, and computers get viruses, so perhaps Covid is taking the drives down...
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Republicans' excess death rate spiked after COVID-19 vaccines arrived, a study says [npr.org]
Quoting from the article you linked:
"The researchers note that their study has several limitations, including the chance that political party affiliation "is a proxy for other risk factors," such as income, health insurance status and chronic medical conditions, along with race and ethnicity. The study focused only on registered Republicans and Democrats; independents were excluded. And because the researchers drilled into data in Florida and Ohio, they warn that their findings might not translate to other
Backblaze proves consumer drives are worse (Score:2)
Backblaze, once again, proves consumer drives have much worse reliability than enterprise drives.
Film at 11.
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> For our purpose, weâ(TM)ll define a drive as old when it is five years old or more. Why? Thatâ(TM)s the warranty period of the drives we are purchasing today
Natural progression (Score:5, Interesting)
HDD sales are falling off a cliff the last two years as flash takes over most of the market. Manufacturers won't be investing in new plants and tooling for a dying product. Product quality will suffer as investment slows and they squeeze the old tooling. The same thing happened with other legacy media. When floppy discs were a profitable thing you could get excellent quality media from tier on manufacturers that would last for years, but as floppies faded out the quality of new media being manufactured by the remaining second tier producers was sheer garbage: out of a box of new discs you would have several bad right off, and after a year the rest would go bad just sitting there.
The next phase for HDD will be a dramatic narrowing of prevailing manufacturers as lines shutdown. Large, bulk storage HDD products will continue obviously, but prices will climb as economies of scale are reduced.
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HDD sales are falling off a cliff the last two years as flash takes over most of the market. Manufacturers won't be investing in new plants and tooling for a dying product. Product quality will suffer as investment slows and they squeeze the old tooling. The same thing happened with other legacy media. When floppy discs were a profitable thing you could get excellent quality media from tier on manufacturers that would last for years, but as floppies faded out the quality of new media being manufactured by the remaining second tier producers was sheer garbage: out of a box of new discs you would have several bad right off, and after a year the rest would go bad just sitting there.
The next phase for HDD will be a dramatic narrowing of prevailing manufacturers as lines shutdown. Large, bulk storage HDD products will continue obviously, but prices will climb as economies of scale are reduced.
Yes, I can buy Enterprise class, 20+ TB flash drives with 5-year warranties for under $500. Yep.
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Source? Best i can find right now is Samsung OEM Datacenter SSD PM9A3 15.36TB for $1k.
Re:Natural progression (Score:4, Informative)
When someone starts a sentence with Yes and ends it with "Yep." it's usually a really big indication that the poster is being sarcastic.
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HDD sales are falling off a cliff the last two years as flash takes over most of the market. Manufacturers won't be investing in new plants and tooling for a dying product. Product quality will suffer as investment slows and they squeeze the old tooling. The same thing happened with other legacy media. When floppy discs were a profitable thing you could get excellent quality media from tier on manufacturers that would last for years, but as floppies faded out the quality of new media being manufactured by the remaining second tier producers was sheer garbage: out of a box of new discs you would have several bad right off, and after a year the rest would go bad just sitting there.
The next phase for HDD will be a dramatic narrowing of prevailing manufacturers as lines shutdown. Large, bulk storage HDD products will continue obviously, but prices will climb as economies of scale are reduced.
Yes, I can buy Enterprise class, 20+ TB flash drives with 5-year warranties for under $500. Yep.
Indeed, bought to you by the people who predicted the death of the tape library.
Re: Natural progression (Score:2)
Prices and sizes! (Score:2)
I am waiting for huge sized SSDs to be cheap or cheaper than huge sized HDDs like 5 TB.
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Give it about 2 years. 1TB SSDs are around $100 now on sale, so you'd probably need a Moore's Law increment to fix that so those 4TB SSDs would drop to $100 or so.
SSD prices follow Moore's law because the same transistors that store data are the same transistors that get smaller.
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I bought an external Seagate USB3 HDD for $100 from Costco several months ago! :/
Re: Natural progression (Score:3)
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The HDD market is moving towards high end devices for special purposes. NAS drives and bulk mass storage, storing AI training data, CCTV recording, and storage for downloaded video games.
The enterprise high end stuff gets the higher quality drives. Consumer stuff gets older tech, and cost optimized manufacturing.
There are a lot of used enterprise drives on eBay now. They are built to higher spec and often have some warranty left. Relying on single drives not dying is not a good strategy for keeping your dat
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The only product dying is consumer grade desktop drives. The HDD is alive and well in all manner of applications and R&D is actively being spent and factories being retooled constantly for newer larger capacity drives.
You may not have a HDD in your desktop anymore, but that doesn't mean the product is dying.
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I think for the enterprise market, HDDs still have a lot of use in them. Even on the desktop, if you need large amounts of storage, they are the de-facto standard.
Yes, 1, 2, or even 4TB HDDs no longer make sense. A 4TB reputable HDD is roughly $120, while a cheaper 4TB (SATA) SSD is about $150. But when you look at, for example, 16TB, enterprise HDDs are roughly $400, while Samsung MZILT15THMLAAD3 will cost almost $2,800, refurbished. And they go even higher capacities now.
Since the number of SAS ports or P
WD, definitely WD (Score:4, Insightful)
But
The worst in my case : Seagate. I used their drives for more than 10 years, ending the series with 3 x 10TB Ironwolf. Believe it or not, I began to have strange bugs and crash on this computer running Linux 24/7, while the S.M.A.R.T. parameters (the ones linked to the drive health, reallocated sectors, etc) were ramping up (and that started right after the first power on).
I changed almost everything, SATA cables, CPU/MoBo/RAM, first price GPU just for text console, power supply, the case too, even running the whole computer outside a case. Still crashing.
I replaced the 3 Seagate drives by 3 WD Gold. Since then, it's running like a charm, no crash at all, and all the S.M.A.R.T. parameters are quiet, staying at zero.
Special note for the Baracuda and Baracuda XT. I have some 3TB that seem much more reliable than all the other Seagate I had.
Seeing those Backblaze stats comfort me, WD and only WD now, even if they are a bit more expensive.
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I'm Guessing: Helium (Score:3)