https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/
Hitachi still the king. It's good to be the king.
Hitachi still the king. It's good to be the king.
Well, in all fairness, WD specifically recommends not using those drives in enclosures with more than 5 drives.What is somewhat disturbing (or interesting) is that the average age in years of the WD red's are only .5. This is basically the same as it was last time, with not a lot of time on the clock for these drives. What will the stats look like when it gets to average age of 2 years, like the Seagates are.
The Seagate drives have been sucktastic from the beginning. The 4TB drives have only been in service there long enough to get out of the infant mortality rate, but there aren't any useful long term numbers. The older drives, (3TB and 1.5TB) had terrible numbers in the last report from Backblaze too. (which, incidentally, echos my experience with ST3000DM001 and ST31500341AS)It would possibly appear that the seagates had some failures starting around the 2 year mark , since the average age is that, and the failure rate has increased from last time.
The Hitachi numbers do look good, but I wouldn't go making any broad generalizations or draw any conclusions about the entire brand, based on a study that included 4 models (out of hundreds)Hitachi is however consistently good across models, time, and other factors. They have 4706 of the 2TB, and 4593 units of the 3TB, and over 5000 of the 4TB's all in operation so I would give some credit to Hitachi on reliability based on this study. The average failure rate for Hitachi as a brand appears like it's about 1%, that seems pretty darn good to me. Much better than WD or Seagate.
There you have it.Should we switch to enterprise drives?
Assuming we continue to see a failure rate of 15% on these drives, would it make sense to switch to “enterprise” drives instead?
There are two answers to this question:
Today on Amazon, a Seagate 3 TB “enterprise” drive costs $235 versus a Seagate 3 TB “desktop” drive costs $102. Most of the drives we get have a 3-year warranty, making failures a non-issue from a cost perspective for that period. However, even if there were no warranty, a 15% annual failure rate on the consumer “desktop” drive and a 0% failure rate on the “enterprise” drive, the breakeven would be 10 years, which is longer than we expect to even run the drives for.
The assumption that “enterprise” drives would work better than “consumer” drives has not been true in our tests. I analyzed both of these types of drives in our system and found that their failure rates in our environment were very similar — with the “consumer” drives actually being slightly more reliable.