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Backblaze-StoragePods

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

Backblaze kicked off its 8TB migration by deploying more than two,700 Seagate HDDs. The visitor migrated an estimated 6.5PB of data from a gear up 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 most how much information Backblaze stores in total, the visitor has released a chart showing its ain capacity growth rate over the past iv years.

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Early reliability data on the new drives is good, without much sign of a bathtub curve (an early period of fourth dimension during which drives initially fail). Well-nigh 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 bespeak cases where Backblaze has either only recently deployed drives or has had a small number of failures in a modest pool). Every bit the 8TB drives get more than apply these figures should settle downwards. The annual failure rate of ii% across all drive families is excellent.

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

Some people question the usefulness of the cumulative Annualized Failure Rate. This is normally based on the idea that drives entering or leaving during the cumulative flow skew the results because they are not there for the entire menstruum. This is one of the reasons we compute the Annualized Failure Charge per unit using "Bulldoze Days". A Drive Day is only recorded if the drive is present in the system. For example, if a bulldoze is installed on July 1st and fails on August 31st, information technology adds 62 bulldoze days and 1 drive failure to the overall results. A drive can be removed from the organization because it fails or mayhap it is removed from service after a migration like the 2TB HGST drives we've covered earlier. In either instance, 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 menstruum.

Seagate continues to exist Backblaze's dominant supplier, because (and this is according to Backblaze) neither Toshiba or Western Digital is specially 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 go on to be lower than any of the products from Toshiba, Seagate, or Western Digital, but the lower toll of Seagate hardware apparently keeps them in the driver's seat.

Earlier this year, Backblaze released its first cumulative report on difficult drive failures after logging one billion hours of drive data. As always, data presented here should be treated as indicative of bulldoze failure rates in particular workloads and scenarios. The Backblaze data ready is by far the all-time and most thorough data bachelor online on how HDDs perform in the real world — but no 1, including Backblaze, argues that its data is representative of all drives in all workloads, or that it can exist perfectly extrapolated to other uses. Failure rates can and will vary by workload — and a certain corporeality of luck.

Now read: Who makes the most reliable difficult drives?