Finally, which manufacturers are hardest to break hard disks is finally revealed by the research result of 25,000 units

ByEpSos .de

Provide online storage service that announced lifetime trend of hard disk (HDD) and prospect of price from data accumulated on businessBackblazeWe have released data on the breakability of HDDs by manufacturer for this time.

Back Blaze Blog »What Hard Drive Should I Buy?
http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/


This time we compare Seagate · Western Digital (WD) · Hitachi's 3 manufacturers. The data is calculated from the survey results of more than 25,000 HDDs.


This is specific HDD manufacturer's number. For Toshiba made · Samsung made it is excluded from consideration this time because the mother number is small.


The 180 TB storage machine "Storage Pod" operated by Backblaze, which was based on this data, looks like this.

180 Terabytes of Good Vibrations - Backblaze Storage Pod 3.0 - YouTube


In this Storage Pod, there are many troubles in some low power consumption models such as "Western Digital Green" 3 TB model and "Seagate LP" 2 TB model, so it is said that it is excluded from the data from the viewpoint of fairness It is that.

◆Full year error rate
As a criterion for measuring the reliability of HDD, here is the graph showing "yearly error occurrence rate" which is the rate of causing errors in one year's operation. The high reliability of Hitachi and the high error occurrence rate of Seagate are in contrast.


More detailed data on the graph above is here. You can see that the error rate of Seagate's "ST31500341AS" model is as high as 25.4%. This is a model known as "F3".


Among the 1.5 TB models made by Seagate, which has a relatively high error rate, the error occurrence rate is higher in the model "Barracuda 7200" of 7200 revolution than "Barracuda LP" which is a power saving model.


Seagate's large capacity model inherits the traditional 1.5 TB model and has relatively high stability, but it seems that there are signs of error due to aged deterioration.


With the condition that "If it is a reasonable price", the recommendation of Backblaze is HDD made by Hitachi. The low error rate is noteworthy.


Backblaze used to adopt the 1 TB model of WD well, but says that many HDDs have been running without problem even after 4 years passed. The high reliability of "Western Digital Red" 3 TB model is origami, so I'd like to adopt it, but because the price is high, it is still not completely transferred.


◆Serious trouble occurrence rate
In Backblaze, even if an error occurs, the PC itself can be used continuously, and in the case of configuring RAID, the rate of getting into a serious situation such that the operation of the system stops is an error It is said to be smaller than incidence. Therefore, data of the rate at which serious troubles such as the system can not operate become important separately from the error occurrence rate. The occurrence rate of serious trouble is as follows, and here also excellent excellence of Hitachi HDD is outstanding.


◆Time series survival rate
The graph below shows the change in HDD survival rate over 3 years. From around a year and a half we can see that the survival rate of Seagate has decreased significantly.


Currently, Backblaze is focusing on making stable capacity of 4 TB large capacity HDD on Storage Pod and is using Seagate 4 TB · HDD (ST 4000 DM000) as storage. However, as Seagate's HDD often suddenly causes problems as time goes on, we are planning to keep an eye on future HDDs.

According to the data released this time by Backblaze, it seems that Hitachi HDDs are said to have the lowest breakage rate and high reliability. Although Hitachi HDD, which has been evaluated as the most reliable "buying" HDD, Hitachi sold HDD business to WD in 2013, so Hitachi's HDD business is nowHGSTWe are supplying HDD under WD umbrella and we can not predict whether we can maintain its reliability in the future.

· Continued
The overwhelming destruction of Seagate products revealed from the record of operating approximately 35,000 HDDs - GIGAZINE