![]() ![]() Getting the failure rate down to 1 percent means you save 2 weeks of employee salary - maybe $5,000 total? The 30,000 drives costs you $4m. In other words, one employee for one month of 8 hour days. If we have 30,000 drives and 2 percent fail, it takes 150 hours to replace those. Replacing one drive takes about 15 minutes of work. Huh?īrian Wilson, CTO and founder of Backblaze (he shares a name with the 71-year-old Beach Boys front man - though we do not think they are one and the same) explains it this way: Double the reliability is only worth 1/10th of 1 percent cost increase. Seagate 4TB Barracuda – even though it supposedly is less reliable than the WD or Hitachi drives. Right now, their most favoured drive is the. One final point: at the end of the “What Drives Should You Buy” post, Beach discussed what Backblaze is buying today. It’s all pretty interesting stuff and points to the need for more rigorous research and testing when it comes to drives and reliability. There are also some issues with exactly how they’re evaluating the drives, how much traffic a consumer drive should be expected to handle, and things along those lines. Seagate publicly disclosed problems with this drive family back in 2008, so it’s not surprising that these drives have, well, problems, right? In his analysis of the analysis, Henry points out that Backblaze’s Seagate results are hugely skewed by two drive models – the 1.5TB Barracuda and Barracuda Green SKUs. But he also backs up his opinions with facts and solid research, making him one of my go-to sources. He’s not what I’d call "reserved" when it comes to sharing his opinions – not a guy who pulls his punches. Henry Newman is a bit of an institution in the HPC and storage world. This article from Instrumental CEO Henry Newman does a great job of digging into the guts of the Backblaze analysis and pointing out the shortcomings in their approach. Looking at big colourful charts tells me that I should avoid Seagate drives like email from a Nigerian bureaucrat who’s just looking for a bit of help getting some money out of his country.īut the real story is a lot more nuanced and complicated. This blog post ( What Hard Drive Should I Buy?) is the one that really got my attention. ![]() So what hard drive should I buy? Tell me, tell me! Beach does acknowledge this fact, but doesn’t see any reason to believe that their enterprise drives will become more reliable in the next three years or to the end of their warranty period. Moreover, Backblaze has only run the enterprise drives for two years, compared to the more than four years of mileage on their consumer disks. Meaning that if only two more enterprise drives had survived, then their analysis would have shown data centre drives to be more reliable than consumer drives. The difference between a 4.2 per cent and 4.6 per cent annual failure rates on 368 drive-years worth of service is only 1.5 spindles. This is a damned small sample on the data centre drive side of the equation. Overall, the enterprise drives had 17 (4.6 per cent) failures while the consumer drives bricked 613 times (4.2 per cent). The problem is that it is comparing 14,719 drive-years of service on its consumer disks vs only 368 drive-years of service on data centre-grade drives. To compute annual failure rates, Backblaze compares failures per "drive-years of service", which is the number of each type of drive they have multiplied by years of service – simple, eh? Take the data centre vs consumer drive failure rate statistic, for example. Yikes! We should stay away from Seagate, then, right? AnalysisĪ bit of digging into the firm's analysis reveals that the foundations underlying the Backblaze conclusions aren’t all that sturdy. ![]() The results were pretty stark, with an “Annual Failure Rate” chart that showed Hitachi drives at less than 2 per cent WD spinners at around 3 per cent and Seagate drives at an astounding 14 per cent for the 1.5TB flavour, ~9 per cent for 3TB, and a high 3.8 per cent or so for the 4GB version. The bottom line, according to Beach, is that consumer drives are a better choice (even after factoring in the longer enterprise warranty) due to their higher reliability and lower cost.Įven more contentious is the last blog, which showed Backblaze failure rates by drive manufacturer. ![]()
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