To that end we expect to order additional Seagate 6 TB hard drives over the coming months, build them into Storage Pods and monitor how they perform. We really like to have multiple qualified hard drives to order and use in our Storage Pods. They also use a little more electricity than we’d like. The Seagate 6TB drives performed well, albeit they loaded a little slower. Assuming the Western Digital drives continue to perform as well in the 5 Storage Pods, we’ll move forward with using the Western Digital 6TB drives in our Storage Pods over the coming months. These will be installed, load tested and deployed shortly. Loading speed – Edge to Western Digital, by a little over 1 TB per day on average."īased on the results, we have ordered 230 Western Digital drives to fill 5 Storage Pods (with 5 spare drives). This small difference adds up when you place 45 drives in a Storage Pod and then stack 10 Storage Pods in a cabinet. SMART Stats (3 months) – No error conditions recorded for the 5 stats that we utilize.Įnergy Use – The Seagate drives were 7200 rpm and used slightly more electricity than the Western Digital drives which were 5400 rpm. Running reliability (3 months) – No failures Initial reliability (how many drives failed) – No failures. Let’s review the Seagate and Western Digital drives so far: What other parameters may be relevant to typical "real-world" home use? Particularly interesting is that they use 5 out of 70 SMART parameters. We’ll see if there is anything interesting and let you know."Ĭomments: Interesting read about how Backblaze determines when a drive has failed. One thing we are looking at is to break down each SMART stat by the drive model, but there are challenges with how drive manufacturers change drive model numbers and how firmware changes occur within a given model. In the meantime, at Backblaze, we’ll continue gathering data and working to correlate it as best we can. Then we, and the rest of the storage community, could examine the data and figure out what’s going on with the drives. We would love to use more – ideally the drive vendors would tell us exactly what the SMART attributes mean. "Backblaze uses SMART 5, 187, 188, 197 and 198 for determining the failure or potential failure of a hard drive. And see the data we have started to analyze from all of the SMART stats to see which other ones predict failure." See which 5 of the SMART stats are good predictors of drive failure below. With nearly 40,000 hard drives and over 100,000,000 GB of data stored for customers, we have a lot of hard-won experience. The dirty industry secret? SMART stats are inconsistent from hard drive to hard drive. While our system handles a drive failing, we prefer to predict drive failures, and use the hard drives’ built-in SMART metrics to help. "I’ve shared a lot of Backblaze data about hard drive failure statistics. What SMART parameters Backblaze uses to determine when a drive "fails" Conversely, the Seagates are typically failing slowly and showing this trait. Long live Stephen."Ĭomments: Since those Hitachi drives that are included the 20 reports have already passed their most common failure point, it may be the reason for their low failure rate in use. He was degaussed and recycled by a local school’s PTA e-cycle program and hopefully lives on as a blender or a beer can. Not typical to Seagate drives, he failed hard and died hard. In typical Seagate fashion he failed towards the end of the load test. On the other hand if a Seagate drive is going to fail during a load test, it will usually fail later on in the test and often it fails soft, meaning it continues to operate but one or more of its SMART attributes are out of compliance." "One of the observations we’ve seen over the years is that if a Hitachi drive is going to fail during the load test, it will usually fail early and hard – it just dies. There's rigorous testing before they're used. "Alas, Poor Stephen is Dead …or what it takes to be a Backblaze hard drive."īackblaze doesn't just pull a drive from the box and put in into service. While it's great that Backblaze is so open about their operations as regards the hard drives used in their data centers, the ultimate bottom line is that they are promoting their service and how their customer's data is kept secure and intact. I highly recommend reading the full posts and comments.
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