Fragile manufacturers reveal from operational performance of approximately 56,000 hard disks

ByNsr 1986

We released data on the failure rate of approximately 56,000 hard disks that Backblaze of online storage service had been operating from the 2nd quarter of 2013 to the 4th quarter of 2015. In the past dataOverwhelmingly fragile Seagate productsGraduallySigns of improvementThe details are revealed as to what happened in the survey this time.

Hard Drive Reviews: Update on 2015 Hard Drive Reliability
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q4-2015/

The graph below shows the failure rate of HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital hard disk (HDD) which Backblaze operated from the 2nd quarter of 2013 to the 4th quarter of 2015. The overwhelmingly high failure rate is about 7% for Western Digital (WDC), followed by about 3.8% for Seagate, which shows that the failure rate of HGST is rather low.


Comparing models of manufacturers, Seagate "ST31500541AS (1.5 TB)" has the highest failure rate of 10.16%, but other models of Seagate are 3% or less across the board. One WDC has only one model that recorded a failure rate of 3% or less, and the failure rate overall is high. Seagate has a past failure rate of 1 TB or 1.5 TB low capacity HDD, but failure rate decreases when the capacity becomes large model. Also, since Seagate's low capacity HDD was replaced with a large capacity one, Seagate seems to be affecting the fact that the failure rate of the entire Seagate has decreased.


As of December 31, 2015 the ratio of the number of operating units is as follows. HGST and Seagate accounted for 97% of the total.


In Backblaze, 3 TB HDD operation is getting considerably fewer. The table below shows the breakdown rate by model of 3 TB HDD, where the overwhelming failure rate of Seagate is conspicuous, but as of 2016 Seagate's 3 TB HDD operation is zero.


Of all the hard disks running in Backblaze, 75% of the hard disks are 4TB HDDs, and the graph below shows the breakdown rate by manufacturer. While Seagate · Toshiba · Western Digital exceeds 2% on average, the excellence of HGST stands out.


The ratio of the 4 TBHDD operating units is as follows. Seagate accounts for approximately 70% of the total.


About 6 TB HDDs running about 2400 in Backblaze are only those of Seagate and Western Digital, Western Digital has overwhelmingly exceeded Seagate.


With Blackblaze's published data, you can see that a fragile manufacturer of hard disks is changing from Seagate to Western Digital. However, it is also a fact that there is a big difference in the failure rate depending on the model.