Backblaze Western Digital

30-04-2021 by



Does Backblaze do anything about 'Piracy?' I have some pirated stuff. A lot of older video games from the 90's that I did buy back then but long since lost the CD Keys and/or discs, a few obscure movies that are important to me, and games from Uplay when I realized I no longer wanted to keep the software for the 10 or so games I had there. Seagate Technology PLC (commonly referred to as Seagate) is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company is incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in.

Backblaze has released its quarterly details on hard drive reliability, including new information on its initial deployment of 8TB hard drives. While SSDs have made marked inroads into the hard drive market thanks to a rapidly diminishing cost-per-bit, hard drives still reign supreme as the most cost-effective method of storing data.

Backblaze kicked off its 8TB migration by deploying more than 2,700 Seagate HDDs. The company migrated an estimated 6.5PB of data from a set of Storage Pods built with 2TB HGST hard drives to a set of Seagate 8TB drives, quadrupling the amount of storage available per-pod. For those of you curious about how much data Backblaze stores in total, the company has released a chart showing its own capacity growth rate over the past four years.

Early reliability data on the new drives is good, without much sign of a bathtub curve (an early period of time during which drives initially fail). Most of the drives have minimal failure rates, though there are a few cases where the gap between the low and high confidence interval is particularly large (these seem to indicate cases where Backblaze has either only recently deployed drives or has had a small number of failures in a small pool). As the 8TB drives get more use these figures should settle down. The annual failure rate of 2% across all drive families is excellent.

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Backblaze offers the following explanation for how it calculates its annualized failure rates.

Some people question the usefulness of the cumulative Annualized Failure Rate. This is usually based on the idea that drives entering or leaving during the cumulative period skew the results because they are not there for the entire period. This is one of the reasons we compute the Annualized Failure Rate using “Drive Days”. A Drive Day is only recorded if the drive is present in the system. For example, if a drive is installed on July 1st and fails on August 31st, it adds 62 drive days and 1 drive failure to the overall results. A drive can be removed from the system because it fails or perhaps it is removed from service after a migration like the 2TB HGST drives we’ve covered earlier. In either case, the drive stops adding Drive Days to the total, allowing us to compute an Annualized Failure Rate over the cumulative period based on what each of the drives contributed during that period.

Seagate continues to be Backblaze’s dominant supplier, because (and this is according to Backblaze) neither Toshiba or Western Digital is particularly interested in selling the company hard drives. This seems rather unlikely given that Toshiba and WD are in the hard drive-selling business, and may have more to do with price competitiveness. Annualized failure rates for HGST drives continue to be lower than any of the products from Toshiba, Seagate, or Western Digital, but the lower cost of Seagate hardware apparently keeps them in the driver’s seat.

Earlier this year, Backblaze released its first cumulative report on hard drive failures after logging one billion hours of drive data. As always, data presented here should be treated as indicative of drive failure rates in particular workloads and scenarios. The Backblaze data set is by far the best and most thorough data available online on how HDDs perform in the real world — but no one, including Backblaze, argues that its data is representative of all drives in all workloads, or that it can be perfectly extrapolated to other uses. Failure rates can and will vary by workload — and a certain amount of luck.

Now read: Who makes the most reliable hard drives?

Backblaze has released its data set for the full year 2018 and there are some surprises in it this time around. Annual failure rates for drives have fallen sharply in comparison with previous years as smaller-capacity HDDs have been replaced by higher-capacity counterparts. This isn’t automatically what you’d expect.

Backblaze Western Digital Seagate

The Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) has fallen every year since 2016, from 1.95 percent to 1.25 percent. That’s a significant decline. Importantly, while this trend doesn’t hold true for every drive family, there are multiple HDDs that show lower AFRs in 2018 than in 2016. Seagate’s 10TB drive family has been particularly good, with a 0.33 percent AFR for 2018, improving on the already-low 0.89 percent AFR for 2017.

For those of you wanting an AFR comparison that stretches back farther than 2016, Backblaze has provided that data as well. The following is the AFR rating for HDDs from 4/20/2013 through 12/31/2018 for all drives still active as of 12/31/2018.

HGST drives continue to impress as far as overall AFR rates and this isn’t the first year that’s been true. Overall, these are some of the most reliable drives over time that Backblaze has tested. The complete AFR rate over all five years is 1.68 percent — higher than the 2018 data alone, but still within a very reasonable window.

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The Caveats

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I’ve written a version of this for every Backblaze post we do, so here’s the latest. Backblaze’s data set is not perfect. The company uses consumer drives in a decidedly enterprise context, which doesn’t remotely reflect the usage patterns these drives would receive if they were being used by an ordinary customer. It constructs and maintains its own storage pods and has iterated on these designs over time, often with improvements intended to reduce vibration or noise. This could also theoretically have an impact on drive reliability. As the video below illustrates, hard drives don’t like it when you scream at them. Always make certain to communicate with your spinning media in a thoughtful, calm voice.

The reason we continue to discuss and feature Backblaze’s data set is the same reason we refer to the Steam Hardware Survey. We know the data sets are imperfect — the SHS’s list of video cards doesn’t include multiple AMD GPUs like Vega 56 or 64 and only added the RX 570 last month. The total number of “Other” GPUs listed is 10.92 percent — more than enough to meaningfully impact the AMD versus Nvidia split listed at the top level of the page. But while these data sets are imperfect, they’re also the best window we have into an important question. HDD manufacturers do not release the kind of reliability information that HDD consumers often want and the handful of third-party studies on the topic frequently don’t identify drive vendors or models.

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