Backblaze's HDD Reliability Report Questions Enterprise Drive Premium

[Guest]

The company’s analysis of its own data highlights something interesting, which is that the difference in observed reliability between its Seagate 8TB consumer and enterprise drives is only 0.1%.

Backblaze's HDD Reliability Report Questions Enterprise Drive Premium : Read more

 

[ammaross]

@Leon (Author)
You also fail to point out that the new Enterprise drives have only been in service for 94 "drive days" (total drive days divided by number of drives) vs the consumer drive's 375 drive days making the consumer drives effectively in service for FOUR TIMES as long. This obviously will skew the "drive failures" value as there's been longer in-service time to have a failure.

 

[bit_user]

I had similar doubts about their "AFR".

What we really want to see is the drive mortality curve (i.e. % of drives still running after x days), for each model. All they'd have to do is keep a database with each individual drive's installation and decommission dates. It's not as much effort as it sounds, since you can read a drive's serial number via SMART.

As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure you can even query the number of hours the drive has been spinning.

 

[ammaross]

@BIT_USER:
Yep, since they have "drive hours" they obviously have an install date. It seems they would document serial number and drive type for "dead/retired" date since they have the failure rate by type. Would be a simple bit of reporting to give a bell curve of death, average life at death, etc. This kind of simple spreadsheet output is nearly useless. 1.1% drive death for drives with 94 days average service life vs 1.2% drive death for drives with 374 days drive life, while mildly useful, really doesn't give you a good dataset to work with.

 

[derekullo]

The price difference between the red pro and the enterprise gold isn't that much, $20.

There is a big difference in performance and warranty between the Red and the Red Pro which is shown in the price.

Red appears to be more of a cold storage device imo.

But with only a $20 difference between the Red Pro and the Gold, I would still go with the Gold even if it was only 0.1% better.

WD Red 8TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM
$274 (3 year warranty)
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822235063

WD Red Pro 8TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM
$320 (5 year warranty)
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822235120

WD Gold 8TB Enterprise Class Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM
$340 (5 year warranty)
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822232558



https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6nq9ef/any_difference_between_wd_red_pro_and_gold/

The above link gives a fairly detailed comparison between Red Pro and Gold.

 

[Tanyac]

personally I find the whole "drive health" and "failure" concepts to be disgusting! Manufacturers have the technology and know-how to make drives that last much much longer. But it's all about cyclical consumption instead of sustainability. I have never owned a Seagate barracuda drive that didn't fail before the warranty period expired (Before the Barracuda Pro came out). Now we have the barracuda pro that is $200 AUD more than the NAS drive... All we are paying for is the extra two years warranty... The drives are essentially the same. I don't trust any HDD manufacturer any more.

 

[sunny420]

Given the information provided, would it be safe to assume the HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 has the highest reliability?

 

[bit_user]

personally I find the whole "drive health" and "failure" concepts to be disgusting! Manufacturers have the technology and know-how to make drives that last much much longer.

To be fair to them, probably most/all of the ways they differentiate between cheaper and more expensive drives do actually cost money.

But it's all about cyclical consumption instead of sustainability.

Yeah, MFW I have to throw some electronics in the "recycling": 🙁

I have never owned a Seagate barracuda drive that didn't fail before the warranty period expired (Before the Barracuda Pro came out).

I know they've had some reliability issues, but did you consider whether you might be subjecting it to any harsh vibrations, excessive workload, dirty power, or elevated temperatures? I've had a few HDDs die on me, over the years, but probably none within the warranty period and most had symptoms long in advance.

I don't trust any HDD manufacturer any more.

The older Backblaze data does suggest some significant difference between manufacturers, which lines up with anecdotal evidence of HGST being a pretty safe bet.

BTW, I just got > 7 years out of 5x WDC Black drives that were warrantied only for 5 years. They still work fine, but I decided not to risk keeping them in service.