Backblaze is a moderately sized hosting company with about 40,000 disks set up in their own style of arrays called Storage Pods, which are open sourced so that you can build one yourself if you so desire. Every once and a while they put out reliability numbers for the HDDs that they use in their arrays; the newest report just arrived for your perusal. This is good as most reliability and market share studies are done by professional organizations which they tend to charge quite a bit for their findings as they do put a lot of effort into ensuring that their data is correct. Unfortunately that also means that most people do not have access to the information and make judgments based on incomplete or incorrect data. As The Register points out, 40,000 HDDs is a very small sample size compared to the market as a whole or even large hosting companies and so the data set you can see here may not be the best representation of the actual market failure rates projected from it may not be overly accurate. On the other hand it is nice to have any data, especially when you are provided with the actual sample size and a definition of failure. If you are really into the numbers game, spend some time researching the Mean Time Between Failure and Average Failure Rate and the ongoing debate on how to properly measure expected mortality rates among large drives.
"We're not entirely comfortable with cloud backup outfit Backblaze's data on disk drive reliability, but the company has just popped out another year's worth of analysis on which drives hang around longest. With due scepticism, let's have a look."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Hands-on With Windows 10’s Preview Build 9926 @ Techgage
- SURPRISE! Microsoft pops open Windows 10 Preview build early @ The Register
- We Can’t Wait to Try Leatherman’s New Wearable @ MAKE:Blog
- Apple's iPhone 7 chip will reportedly be supplied by Samsung Electronics @ The Inquirer
- Tenda AV1000 Gigabit Powerline Adapter @ eTeknix
just an FYI: The B in MTBF
just an FYI: The B in MTBF does not stand for Before. It stands for Between. Big difference. Here is the wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBF
You are absolutely right,
You are absolutely right, that was rather dumb of me.
I used to work next to a
I used to work next to a logistics guy many years ago. I must have heard him say that a thousand times. I still notice when people do that and can’t stop myself from correcting them. That’s not even close to the dumb things I’ve done this week.
Your “dumb” is smarter than
Your “dumb” is smarter than 95% of the vox populi!
All the HDDs I’ve lost in the
All the HDDs I’ve lost in the past two years have been Seagate 3TB… and one 4TB.
Seagate = Open the “gate” and
Seagate = Open the “gate” and throw it into the “sea”.
A report doesn’t have to have
A report doesn’t have to have perfect scientific method to validate general trends it portrays. Seagate really needs to step up there game. They have only a single competitor. It shouldn’t be too hard for them to be competent.
Would have been nice to see
Would have been nice to see some of the HGST and WD drives about the same age as most of the Seagates. Looking forward to next years data.
I will add, those numbers do closely match my own drive failure rates (on a much smaller scale) by mfg.
This is good as most
This is good as most reliability and market share studies are done by professional organizations which they tend to charge quite a bit for their findings as they do put a lot of effort into ensuring that their data is correct.
The word they before tend in the above sentence in not needed as in this context of an professional organization implies multiple people.
Hahaha.
(an) should be (a) in
Hahaha.
(an) should be (a) in the above post. Opps:)
Geuss I need some grammar lessons too.
yep, should not have inserted
yep, should not have inserted they into that sentence
the fact is they released all
the fact is they released all the data on the drives they used, the shame is that is that you cannot pin down the n for statistical analysis.
that said- you have more than enough information to make you relook at your QA internally if you work for one of the three companies. So if i worked at Seagate and WD I would start a re-check of processes to try to discover why my failure rates are more than HGST’s.
since each make a similar widget it is all due to process steps – so each company should be able to get the process better in the next year.
as for the consumer- we’ll it serves as a guide:
4TB first
If you can afford HGST buy it
If not WD
last gasp Seagate
Paragraph breaks aren’t
Paragraph breaks aren’t really your thing are they Jeremy? Not trying to be a jerk i just can’t standing reading walls of text.
Fair enough. It doesn’t
Fair enough. It doesn't grammatically rate two paragraphs and is a wee bit short of a wall o' text compared to what I am used to reading though.
They have been talking about
They have been talking about AMD’s Zen for a few days now on the other tech websites, And for sure the Tech Reports’ 4 resident astroturfers are all over it with their FUD. But it would be nice if you could mention any news about Zen, and other CPU info when its hits the news channels, I’m not saying that this article is not interesting for the information it provides.
It is interesting that the more stories that appear, concerning AMD’s new x86 microarchitecture, the more I’m seeing an uptick in coordinated FUD against AMD. Posters are attacking HSA, as if it was somehow an AMD invention, when HSA as a generic computing sciences concept, has been around for decades, and it is nice to be able to utilize the GPU for general purpose computing, as well as graphics.
P.S. all you astroterfers out there do not blame AMD for the lack of HSA support in the XBONE, or PS4, as that is M$, and Sony’s fault. HSA aware hardware, requires HSA aware OS’s and HSA aware drivers and graphics APIs to take advantage of HSA’s computing abilities. If you want to see HSA aware OSs, look no farther than the mobile OSs and the latest mobile graphics APIs, in mobile where space is at a premium, as well as the thermal and power constraints, HSA is already big among the ARM based systems, and ARM holdings, as well as Imagination Technologies, and many more are all members of the HSA foundation.