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Backblaze-StoragePods

Backblaze has released its quarterly details on hard bulldoze reliability, including new information on its initial deployment of 8TB difficult drives. While SSDs have made marked inroads into the difficult drive market thanks to a rapidly diminishing toll-per-bit, hard drives yet reign supreme equally the almost toll-constructive method of storing data.

Backblaze kicked off its 8TB migration by deploying more than 2,700 Seagate HDDs. The company migrated an estimated half dozen.5PB of data from a fix 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 yous curious about how much data Backblaze stores in total, the company has released a chart showing its own capacity growth charge per unit over the past four years.

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Early on reliability information on the new drives is good, without much sign of a bathtub curve (an early period of time during which drives initially fail). Nearly of the drives have minimal failure rates, though there are a few cases where the gap between the low and loftier confidence interval is specially large (these seem to indicate cases where Backblaze has either but recently deployed drives or has had a small number of failures in a small pool). As the 8TB drives go more than apply these figures should settle downwardly. The almanac failure rate of 2% across all drive families is first-class.

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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 Charge per unit. This is usually based on the idea that drives entering or leaving during the cumulative period skew the results because they are not there for the unabridged flow. This is one of the reasons we compute the Annualized Failure Rate using "Drive Days". A Drive 24-hour interval is only recorded if the drive is present in the system. For instance, if a drive is installed on July 1st and fails on August 31st, it adds 62 bulldoze days and one drive failure to the overall results. A drive can be removed from the system because it fails or maybe 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 usa to compute an Annualized Failure Charge per unit over the cumulative period based on what each of the drives contributed during that period.

Seagate continues to exist Backblaze's dominant supplier, because (and this is according to Backblaze) neither Toshiba or Western Digital is particularly interested in selling the company hard drives. This seems rather unlikely given that Toshiba and WD are in the difficult drive-selling concern, and may have more to do with price competitiveness. Annualized failure rates for HGST drives go along to be lower than any of the products from Toshiba, Seagate, or Western Digital, but the lower cost of Seagate hardware patently keeps them in the driver's seat.

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

At present read: Who makes the nigh reliable difficult drives?