New BackBlaze Stats

[reader50 5]

For anyone interested, BackBlaze has posted new HD stats. Their HD Summary for 2018. Highlights:

• They've deployed 1,205 Toshiba 14TB drives. Annualized failure rate projected at 3%, normal for initial burn-in. They've been in service one quarter, with actual failure rate of 0.75% so far. Annual figure expected to decline going forward. Depending on how good a price they got per drive, they may have paid over $500K for the set.

• They've deployed a heck of a lot of Seagate 12TB drives. 31,146 with annual failure rate projected at 1.39%. Once again, they've been in service less than a year on average. So this is probably mostly burn-in losses. Probably spent at least $10M buying them all.

• No mention of the new Toshiba 16TB drives. Which I have not seen for sale anywhere.

• HGST has the best reliability again by small margins. Seagate's figures continue to improve with later models. WD is dropping off the chart as older models are retired - BB is not adding any new WDs.

[continuum 18]

Everything 8TB and larger seems to be pretty reliable, at least we haven't found any Seagate 3TB ST3000DM001 or WD Green 1.5TB-like failure rates anywhere just yet. The 8TB stuff has at least been around long enough to make me pretty confident in that, the 12TB and larger not yet.

[Brian 157]

It's the rebuild time on these much larger HDDs that starts to get a little scary depending on how and what you're running. 

[continuum 18]

That's what people have been saying since hard disks hit 1TB, then 2TB...

 

That said we're long past the days where single parity in an array made sense. Long past.

[Brian 157]

We're at the point now with some NAS reviews where it takes a few days to get to the point where we can test. It will operate, just not at best performance levels.