About 66,000 units of HDD failure rate data which shows which maker made hard disk is hardest to break

ByThomas Hawk

Backblaze has announced the failure rate of HDDs that make up its online storage every quarter, and last time there were 266 malfunctions in 3 months compared to 65,153 units in operation, failures The rate was 1.84%. In the current fiscal year, we increased the number of used HDDs to 68,813 units and finally announced how the failure rate changed in the second quarter (April - June 2016).

Hard Drive Failure Rates: The Results from 68,813 Hard Drives
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q2-2016/

The HDD operated by Backblaze is HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, WDC. The failure rate for 3 months is calculated for the whole · model. The overall failure rate was 1.97%, 0.13 points higher than the previous term. It means that 314 of 68,813 units have failed. Looking at each model the greatest number of failures was Seagate's "ST 4000 DM 000(4 TB) ", 228 units have failed in total operating number of 36,693 units and 3,126,610 days in total operation days. It is a number that accounts for about two-thirds of the number of failures this fiscal year, but because of the large number of operating units, the failure rate is as low as 2.68%.

On the other hand, the failure rate was the highest in Seagate's "ST 4000 DX 000(4 TB) "in 19.81%, 10 units have failed in total operating 197 units and total operating days 18,828 days. Looking at each manufacturer of HGST, Seagate, Toshiba and WDC, it seems that the failure rate on the whole in this term was HDD of HGST.


The data stored in Backblaze's storage continues to climb to the right and Backblaze mentioned about plans to increase the 8 TB HDD in addition to the main 4 TB HDD that I used so far . For economic reasons Seagate's "2720 units were originally introduced"ST 8000 DM 002In addition to HGST's "HUH 728080 ALE 600"45 are installed.


With the introduction of 8 TB HDD, it became possible to move data of 6.5 PB or more with one storage pod, and the total amount of data stored in Backblaze has reached 250 PB. With the addition of 7290 units from the previous term, the number of HDDs placed in Backblaze's data center will be 68,813 units, so it seems that it is not so far to get on the 70,000 unit's market.

Data on the annual failure rate calculated from the failure rate from April 10, 2013 to June 30, 2016 is also published. The worst failure rate in three years is WDC's "WD 20 EF RX(2 TB) "in 9%, it is understood that 15 out of the 69,900 units are out of order.


The equipment configuration of Backblaze's data center is as follows. HGST's "HMS 5 C 4040 BLE 640 (4 TB)" of HGST which accounts for 50.4% of the total in Seagate's "ST 4000 DM000 (4 TB)", the next largest accounts for 12.3%, the third is HGST "HMS 5 C 4040 ALE 640 (4 TB) ".


If you want to verify more detailed data on what type of failure rate you are actually using yourself,The Raw Hard Drive Test DataAt the bottom of the page,Q2_2016_docs.zip(106 KB) ""Q2_2016_data.zip(292.4 MB) "can be downloaded from.