Question New HDD - Toshiba 16 TB - But Backblaze article came out = Bad drive...?

[thomas81br]

Hello

Im in the process of choosing a new HDD, i had some drives in mind, but on some forum i was recommended even bigger and "better" drive for the same price - Toshiba 16TB, MG08ACA16TE. I liked it a lot from all the descriptions... But just few days ago new Back Blaze article about their HDD failure rates for 2022 came out

Backblaze Drive Stats for 2022

Check out the 2022 year-end Drive Stats data, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

www.backblaze.com

And I by pure accident came across it. What was my surprise when i saw that my new choice is among them - MG08ACA16TE.

And it doesnt look good... Although the drive SHOULD be GOOD (has 5 years warranty, 2.5 milion MTBF etc...) , BUT... according to the REAL WORLD samples/stats, it doesnt really look good... They have like 6000 of these (!) so the numbers that they give should give you a good idea about that HDD in general (if they had only 2 drives, who cares, 6000 drives is according to me a good sample size to make a judgement). They ran only for like a year (14,7 months) and ALREADY (!) they have AFR of 1,57% (!). Thats like almost the worst (if not WORST) number of all the drives with similiar "age" they have...

According to this:

https://storage.toshiba.com/docs/enterprise-hdd-documents/ehdd-mg08_product-overview_rev-3.pdf

The AFR should be (is stated that it is): 0,35%... And JUST in the 1st year of REAL WORLD USAGE (with 6000 samples (!) ) showed the real world AFR of 1,57%, thats like 4.5 times more than it should be...
So... this drives appears to be a BAD drive... right? And i should NOT go for it in light on these newly revealed real life "tests"...? Or is it possible that this drive just fails more in the first year and THAN it stabilizes its AFR on a much better number...? According to my understanding, if a drive exhibits unexpectedly high failure rate for the 1st year, its safe to assume, the failure rate will NOT get any better with years passing...?

Correct?

What would you thought about these revelations about the drive...? From all i know about PC HW and HDDs it appears to me, that this is a bad drive... (?) (in terms of reliability)

Thank you

 

[DSzymborski]

There's nothing particularly alarming here. And yes, it's common for initial year of a hard drive to be moderately more failure prone than the few years after the first year. As Backblaze themselves have discussed:

 

[USAFRet]

I had/have that exact same drive.

Oct 2021, it died, after 7 months of use.

Its replacement (warranty) is still going strong.

The real takeaway, though.....any drive can die at any moment.
The singular one on your desk or mine....may live forever. Or it may die next week.
Fleetwide stats from BackBlaze are interesting, but says little about your specific copy.
The numbers from BackBlaze show this drive to be right in the middle of the pack, failwise.

 

[thomas81br]

Thank

I had/have that exact same drive.

Oct 2021, it died, after 7 months of use.

Its replacement (warranty) is still going strong.

The real takeaway, though.....any drive can die at any moment.
The singular one on your desk or mine....may live forever. Or it may die next week.
Fleetwide stats from BackBlaze are interesting, but says little about your specific copy.
The numbers from BackBlaze show this drive to be right in the middle of the pack, failwise.

Thanks . Lol that doesnt instil confidence in me, that even on some random internet forum i found a guy who have this drive fail on him .
The replacement is going on like 14+ months now correct?

 

[USAFRet]

Thank


Thanks . Lol that doesnt instil confidence in me, that even on some random internet forum i found a guy who have this drive fail on him .
The replacement is going on like 14+ months now correct?

About 12 months, but yes, doing just fine.