Hard Drive Error Rate
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Selecting a Disk Drive: How Not to Do Research Posted January 28, 2014 By Henry Newman Send Email » More Articles » I wasn’t impressed last week when I saw Brian Beach’s blog on what disk drive to buy. I wasn’t impressed due to the lack of intellectual rigor in the analysis most reliable hard drive 2016 of the data he presented. In my opinion, clearly Beach has something else going on or
Hard Drive Failure Rates 2016
lacks understanding of how disk drives and the disk drive market work. Let me preface this article with the following full disclosure: I own no
Hgst Hard Drives
stock in Seagate, WD, or Toshiba, nor do I have family or close friends working at any of those companies. I do not buy disk storage, as in my consulting role I am not allowed to resell hardware or software
External Hard Drive Failure Rates
by agreement. I do know people in two of the three companies and have for years, but I have not been given free stuff nor would I take it. Basically, the only agenda I have is a comprehensive factual analysis, which in my opinion is lacking in Beach’s blog post. Let’s start at the second table in Beach’s article. I have added a few columns in green that were not part of the original, but the information in these columns hard drive failure causes can be found on the web with a bit of work, and as you will see are pretty important. Post a comment Email Article Print Article Share Articles Digg DZone Reddit Slashdot StumbleUpon del.icio.us Facebook FriendFeed Furl Let’s talk about the release data first. The oldest drive in the list is the Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drive from 2006. A drive that is almost 8 years old! Since it is well known in study after study that disk drives last about 5 years and no other drive is that old, I find it pretty disingenuous to leave out that information. Add to this that the Seagate 1.5 TB has a well-known problem that Seagate publicly admitted to, it is no surprise that these old drives are failing. Now for the other end of the spectrum, new drives. Everyone knows that new drives have infant mortality issues. Drive vendors talk about it, the industry talks about it, RAID vendors talk about it, but there is not a single mention of what, if anything, is done in the Backblaze environment or how that figures into any of the calculations. This is never discussed in terms of: does Backblaze have a burn in period? Are they buying drives from someone that has burned in some and not others? There are lots of questions here. Next let’s move to the hard error rate in bits. One of the definitions of consumer drives as compared to enterp
Backing Up | Backblaze Bits Be the first to know! Subscribe today to receive Backblaze blog post emails automatically! This field is required Join No Spam. Unsubscribe any time. Follow us: Cloud backup. Mac or PC. Unlimited data. $5/month. And you can try hard drive failure fix it for free today. One Billion Drive Hours and Counting: Q1 2016 Hard Drive Stats May hgst external hard drive 17th, 2016 For Q1 2016 we are reporting on 61,590 operational hard drives used to store encrypted customer data in our data center. There are hms5c4040ble640 9.5% more hard drives in this review versus our last review when we evaluated 56,224 drives. In Q1 2016, the hard drives in our data center, past and present, totaled over one billion hours in operation to date. That’s nearly http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-hardware/selecting-a-disk-drive-how-not-to-do-research-1.html 42 million days or 114,155 years worth of spinning hard drives. Let’s take a look at what these hard drives have been up to. Backblaze hard drive reliability for Q1 2016 Below are the hard drive failure rates for Q1 2016. These are just for Q1 and are not cumulative, that chart is later. Some observations on the chart: The list totals 61,523 hard drives, not 61,590 noted above. We don’t list drive models in this chart of which we have less https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/ than 45 drives. Several models have an annual failure rate of 0.00%. They had zero hard drive failures in Q1 2016. Failure rates with a small number of failures can be misleading. For example, the 8.65% failure rate of the Toshiba 3TB drives is based on one failure. That’s not enough data to make a decision. The overall Annual Failure Rate of 1.84% is the lowest quarterly number we’ve ever seen. Cumulative hard drive reliability rates We started collecting the data used in these hard drive reports on April 10, 2013, just about three years ago. The table below is cumulative as of 3/31 for each year since 4/10/2013. One billion hours of spinning hard drives Let’s take a look at what the hard drives we own have been doing for one billion hours. The one billion hours is a sum of all the data drives, past and present, in our data center. For example, it includes the WDC 1.0TB drives that were recently retired from service after an average of 6 years in operation. Below is a chart of hours in service to date ordered by drive hours: The “Others” line accounts for the drives that are not listed because there are or were fewer than 45 drives in service. In the table above, the Seagate 4TB drive leads in “hours in service” but which manufacturer has the most hours in service? The chart below sheds some light on this to
1954; 61 years ago(1954-12-24)[a] Invented by IBM team led by Rey Johnson A disassembled and labeled 1997 HDD lying atop a mirror Play media An https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive overview of how HDDs work A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive or fixed disk[b] is a data storage device used for storing and retrieving digital information using one https://www.high-rely.com/blog/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009-not/ or more rigid rapidly rotating disks (platters) coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to hard drive the platter surfaces.[2] Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored or retrieved in any order and not only sequentially. HDDs are a type of non-volatile memory, retaining stored data even when powered off. Introduced by IBM in 1956,[3] HDDs became the dominant secondary storage device for general-purpose computers by the early 1960s. Continuously hard drive failure improved, HDDs have maintained this position into the modern era of servers and personal computers. More than 200 companies have produced HDDs historically, though after extensive industry consolidation most current units are manufactured by Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. As of 2016[update], HDD production (in bytes per year) is growing, although unit shipments and sales revenues are declining. The primary competing technology for secondary storage is flash memory in the form of solid-state drives (SSDs), which have higher data-transfer rates, higher areal storage density, better reliability,[4] and much lower latency and access times.[5][6][7][8] While SSDs have higher cost per bit, SSDs are replacing HDDs where speed, power consumption, small size, and durability are important.[7][8] The primary characteristics of an HDD are its capacity and performance. Capacity is specified in unit prefixes corresponding to powers of 1000: a 1-terabyte (TB) drive has a capacity of 1,000 gigabytes (GB; where 1 gigabyte = 1 billion bytes). Typically, some of an HDD's capacity is unavailable to the user because it is used by the file system and the computer operating system, and possibly inbuilt redunda
Working in 2009 - Not Necessarily By Darren McBride Share: Could you write and then read an entire 3TB drive fivetimes without an error? Suppose you were to run a burn in test on a brand new Seagate 3TB SATA drive, writing 3TB and then reading it back to confirm the data. Our standards are such that if a drive fails during 5 cycles we won’t ship it. Luckily, all 20 of 20 drives we tested last night passed. In fact, most of the 3TB drives we test every week passed this test. Why is that a big deal? Because there is a calculation floating around out there that shows when reading a full 3TB drive there is a 21.3% chance of getting an unrecoverable read error. Clearly the commonly used probability equation isn’t modeling reality. To me this raises red flags on previous work discussing the viability of both stand alone SATA drives and large RAID arrays. It’s been fiveyears since Robin Harris pointed out that the sheer size of RAID-5 volumes, combined with the manufacturer’s Bit Error Rate (how often an unrecoverable read error occurs reading a drive) made it more and more likely that you would encounter an error while trying to rebuild a large (12TB) RAID-5 array after a drive failure. Robin followed up his excellent article with another “Why RAID-6 stops working in 2019” based on work by Leventhal. Since RAID-5 is still around it seems Mark Twain’s quote “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” is appropriate. Why hasn’t it happened? Certainly RAID-6 has become more popular in server storage systems. But RAID-5 is still used extensively, and on 12TB and larger volumes that Robin predicts don’t recover well from drive failures. Before I get into some mind numbing math let me give away what I think might be an answer: Because the Bit Error Rate (BER) for some large SATA drives are clearly better than what the manufacturer says. The spec is expressed as a worst case scenario and in the real world experience is different. Seagate’s BER on 3TB drives is stated as 10^14,but may be understated. Hitachi’s bit error rate on their 4TB SATA drives are 10^15 and in my experience the two drives perform similarly from a reliability perspective. That order of magnitude makes a big difference on the calculations of expecte