Backblaze: Seagate 4TB HDDs have relatively low failure rates
Backblaze has released a new report on the reliability of HDDs in its data centers. The cloud service provider has largely switched to 4TB HDDs from Seagate, which prove to be much more reliable than the 3TB variants.
Seagate has regularly been in the news in recent years because of the high failure rates of HDDs with storage capacities of 1.5TB and 3TB. Backblaze used thousands of such HDDs in its Storage Pods in data centers. Over the course of 2015, Backblaze phased out these HDDs and replaced them with other HDDs. The new reliability report shows that Seagate HDDs with a capacity of 4TB are much less problematic.
At the end of 2015, Backblaze had more than 29,000 Seagate ST4000DM000 HDDs in use, with an average age of 12.2 months. The dropout rate was 2.99 percent. HGST’s HDDs are still the most reliable according to statistics. The company uses three different variants of 4TB HDDs from that brand, totaling nearly 13,000 units. The average dropout rate is less than 1 percent. The reason Backblaze chose Seagate’s 4TB HDDs over the even more reliable HGSTs is that the models the cloud provider uses are no longer available and have been replaced by more expensive variants.
Seagate’s ST6000DX000 HDD with a capacity of 6TB also performs relatively well in the test. Of the 1,882 units that Backblaze has put into use this year, 1.89 percent have failed. This makes the drives outperform the 6TB WD60EFRX HDDs, which have a failure rate of 5.81 percent. Despite the fact that the Seagate 6TB HDDs are more reliable than the 4TB variants, they are not interesting for Backblaze to use on a large scale. The price per gigabyte is higher and the larger HDDs also consume an average of sixty percent more energy.
The oldest HDDs that Backblaze still has in its data centers are the 2TB variants of HGST. The 4489 HDDs have an average age of almost five years and a failure rate of 1.55 percent. Strikingly, the WD HDDs generally score worse than those of HGST, while WD is the parent company of the latter.
Last year, Backblaze’s reliability survey report found that more than four out of every ten Seagate 3TB HDDs were failing. The 1.5TB variants also showed a remarkable number of defects, 23.5 percent of these HDDs failed. The cloud provider’s report is being used by lawyers in a class action lawsuit recently launched against Seagate. Many consumers would also have suffered from problems with the HDDs and through the case they want to get their money back and they are also demanding compensation for lost data.
Like many cloud providers, Backblaze uses regular HDDs in its data centers. While these drives are not designed for continuous use and may fail sooner, in the case of mass storage, this outweighs the higher costs associated with dedicated server HDDs. At the end of 2015, Backblaze had 56,224 HDDs in use, compared to 39,690 drives at the beginning of the year.