HDD failure rate report of approximately 100,000 units Released 2018 Q 3 edition, high reliability of large capacity model revealed

Backblaze , which provides cloud storage service, released the 2018 Q3 (July to September) version of the failure rate data of the hard disk (HDD) of the storage center operated by the company. Finally, all the 3 TB models retired and a large capacity 12 TB model became the mainstay, but it has been confirmed that the reliability of the HDD as a whole is improved by massive introduction of a large capacity model of 8 TB or more.

Backblaze Drive Stats: 2018 Hard Drive Failure Rates
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/2018-hard-drive-failire-rates/

As of September 30, 2018, Backblaze has 1866 HDDs for the system and 97,770 for the data, reaching 100 thousand units before. Among them, information on the failure rate and error rate on 97,700 data for data, excluding data with a minimum operating number of 45 units and data for test HDDs, was released.

First of all, the characteristic feature of the 2018 Q3 data is that the large capacity model exceeding 8 TB is increasing significantly. All 180 Western Digital (WDC) 3TB models that were operated from Q2 (April to June) in 2018 were replaced with large capacity models. And the largest number of units to be operated is 25101 Seagate's " ST 12000 NM 0007 ", and the main model is shifting to 12 TB. According to Backblaze, the reliability of the large capacity model exceeding the capacity of 8 TB including ST 12000 NM 0007 is very good.

In the future, as the data service market will continue to grow, including the cloud service over the next several years, HDD capacity is expected to increase, Seagate and Western Digital announced the 40 TB model in 2023 after five years It is a plan to release. Backblaze continues to replace the HDD with a relatively small capacity with a large capacity HDD, and it seems that the number of HDDs operated in Q3 in 2018 has decreased by 584, but the capacity itself has increased significantly . Thanks to the large capacity of the HDD, it is economical because it can increase the total capacity without adding new cloud storage.

The table below shows the failure rate and error rate under conditions that do not limit the duration of the HDD that was operated as of September 30, 2018. For Annual Failure Rate (AFR), Seagate's ST12000NM0007 is 1.21%, and the 10 TB model " ST10000NM0086 " with more than 1 year of operation experience has surprisingly struck 0.48%, such as 0.48%, and the large capacity model has generally given good numerical values And that. As a result of replacing with a large capacity model, the overall AFR improved further from Q1 in 2018 which was 1.71% and 1.82%, and it seems that we achieved the highest reliability ever.

As described above, it became clear that the reliability of the large capacity model HDD exceeding the capacity of 8 TB is generally high. Backblaze is planning to replace the low dose model with a large capacity model in the future and plans to replace the 4 TB model with a large capacity HDD of 14 TB model or more in the next few years.