[HN Gopher] Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2022
___________________________________________________________________
Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2022
Author : caution
Score : 154 points
Date : 2022-05-04 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.backblaze.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.backblaze.com)
| ww520 wrote:
| Is there a failure list for write heavy drives? The drives for my
| security system have failed twice already. They are NAS grades
| from Seagate and WD.
| brianwski wrote:
| Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze but more on the backup client
| side that runs on laptops, not in the datacenter storage side.
|
| > Is there a failure list for write heavy drives?
|
| To be clear about what these drive failure stats are and what
| they are not: Backblaze runs a data storage service with about
| 214,000 hard drives in it right now. We don't run any specific
| tests or induce issues on purpose FOR the drive failure stats,
| we just report what occurred in our datacenter.
|
| Sometimes readers think we're carefully running a "study", but
| it's more just what we have experienced as honestly as we can
| offer it up. If the reads and writes and seeks our drives
| experience matches your particular application, great! Or maybe
| it is just interesting to read.
|
| Now, we do save (and publish) all the raw data, and some other
| awesome people out there have done various analysis on it,
| which always makes us happy also. You can find the raw data
| here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html At
| this point it goes back almost a full decade.
| isomorphic wrote:
| It looks like the data does contain SMART 241, total LBAs
| written, for at least some drives.
|
| Someone with some time could correlate that to failure rate.
| My hypothesis is _of course_ it 's correlated--but by how
| much?
| brianwski wrote:
| > Someone with some time could correlate SMART data to
| failure rate.
|
| We looked into it a little, some notes written up here:
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-smart-stats-indicate-
| har...
|
| Short summary is there are a few SMART stats that seem to
| predict failure way more than others, which is probably
| obvious. But we aren't PhDs in statistics and it isn't our
| area of focus, so....
|
| This guy wrote a paper based on the Backblaze SMART data: h
| ttps://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?acc
| ...
|
| These 5 guys wrote another paper based on the Backblaze
| SMART data to train up a Bayesian network to predict
| failures: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8489097
|
| This is another article of predicting hard drive failures
| using the Backblaze SMART data:
| https://karthikna.github.io/Prediction-of-Hard-Drive-
| Failure...
|
| I can't comment on their findings, but it's DEFINITELY an
| interesting thing to study now that we have almost 10 years
| of these drive stats across a pretty big drive farm.
| ksec wrote:
| The whole reason why the market still demands HGST. There is a
| whole segment / sector / section of industry that refuse to call
| it anything other than HGST. And they are willing to pay for it.
| jenny91 wrote:
| The thing people care about is the AFR over time: like actuarial
| life tables. These updates always make it a bit hard to figure
| that one out: the tables show "average life" and AFR; it makes no
| sense to compare drives of different ages.
|
| The "Age vs AFR" plot is getting there but it should be flipped
| and is hard to read; error bars would also help.
|
| Also percentiles would be useful: people want to minimize the
| probability of failure.
| dsr_ wrote:
| I had osmosed that the bathtub curve isn't real, but the new
| time-trail quadrant graph certainly looks like evidence for at
| least the infant-mortality section.
| raybb wrote:
| I wonder if they consider doing something like putting data more
| likely to be accessed on the more reliable drives so that that
| ones that wear out easier are used less.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I love these stats
|
| Generally I only buy enterprise drives
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| According to https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-backblaze-buys-
| hard-drive..., consumer drives give better quality, and the
| main reason BB buys enterprise drives is that consumer drives
| aren't available at their scale.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| I don't even look at reviews when it's time to add more storage.
| I go straight to these updates. Hasn't steered me wrong.
| comboy wrote:
| These have been popular for some time now and I've been
| wondering what are the chances of manufacturers sending better
| batches to Backblaze. I imagine you run some batch and some
| percentage of disks don't pass tests, you may adjust something
| or maybe it's the last one before routine machine maintenance,
| etc. No idea if there really even is such thing as batches
| which manufacturers know have higher failure rates. But it
| would be interesting.
|
| Backblaze shouldn't complain though ;)
| Sakos wrote:
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-backblaze-buys-hard-
| drive...
|
| Some interesting answers to this and other questions.
| mark-r wrote:
| I was wondering why there were so many Star Wars quotes, then I
| realized today is May the fourth. Nicely done!
| joncrane wrote:
| I like how the article was posted on May 4th and it has lots of
| Star Wars references.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Lovely and wonderfully punny write up.
|
| I wonder if they've done any proper Cox proportional hazards
| lifetime analysis across the different models? The stats for this
| sort of problem are well developed. Of course, the hazard is not
| going to be proportional, I suspect, bit I'd love to see that
| come out of the regression...
| alex3305 wrote:
| Based on these reports and pricing, I've currently filled my NAS
| with only Toshiba drives. 1 4TB, 1 5TB and 2 14TB drives and all
| of them have been great. These enterprise drives are quite noisy,
| but my oldest already runs for over 4 years without any
| reallocated sectors or other issues. Apart from that, Toshiba
| provides free 5 year warranty on these drives.
|
| And the best thing? These bad boys are only 250 euro's for 14TB
| or 300 euro's for 18TB of raw storage capacity.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-04 23:01 UTC)