We will continue to add these large drives over the coming quarters and track them along the way. While most of these are the 14TB Toshiba drives, all of the above have been qualified for use in our data centers.įor all of the drive models besides the Toshiba 14TB drive, the number of drive days is still too small to conclude anything, although the Seagate 14TB model, the Toshiba 16TB model, and the Seagate 18TB model have experienced no failures to date. The total of 19,878 represents 13.2% of our operational data drives. The table below summarizes our current utilization of these drives. Today, we’ll define big drives as 14TB, 16TB, and 18TB drives. When we first started collecting hard drive data back in 2013, a big drive was 4TB, with 5TB and 6TB drives just coming to market. The 16TB Toshiba drive model is more likely to be deployed going forward as we get ready to deploy the next wave of big drives. In the case of the 10TB HGST drive, the availability and qualification of multiple 12TB models has reduced the likelihood that we would use more of this drive model. These are drives that are qualified for use in our data centers, but we haven’t deployed in quantity yet. Such drives are, of course, reformatted, wiped, and then must pass our qualification process to be reinstalled. Most of these drives were new when they were installed, but sometimes we reuse a drive that was removed from service, typically via a migration. For example, we still have three WDC 6TB drives in use they are installed in three different Storage Pods, along with 6TB drives from Seagate and HGST. This happens when a given drive model is no longer available for purchase, but we have many in operation and we need a replacement. Nearly all of these drives were used as replacement drives. There were 190 drives (150,947 minus 150,757) that were not included in the Q3 2020 Quarterly Chart above because we did not have at least 60 drives of a given model. We’ll cover how they did that in a future post, but let’s just say they were busy. In this quarter they added nearly 11,000 new drives totaling over 150PB of storage, all while operating under strict Covid-19 protocols. Even with the lower drive failure rates, our data center techs are not bored. The Q3 2020 annualized failure rate (AFR) of 0.89% is slightly higher than last quarter at 0.81%, but significantly lower than the 2.07% from a year ago. If you want to give a refurbished drive a try, that’s fine, but that’s not what our numbers are based on. There are stories dating back to 2016 where folks tried to order this drive and got a refurbished drive instead. If someone from HGST/WDC can confirm or deny that for us in the comments that would be great. Why? You’re probably not going to get a new one and if you do, it will really be at least three years old, as HGST/WDC hasn’t made these drives in at least that long. Everything else is awesome, but hold on before you run out and buy one. The 4TB HGST (model: HMS5C4040ALE640) has 274,923 drive days with no failures this quarter.Next quarter will give us a better picture. The 14TB Seagate model (ST14000NM001G) has 21,120 drive days with 2,400 drives, but they have only been operational for less than one month.The 4TB Toshiba model (MD04ABA400V) has only 9,108 drive days, but they have been putting up zeros for seven quarters straight.Still, I wouldn’t try to draw any conclusions yet, but a quarter or two more like this and we might have something to say. The 16TB Seagate model (ST16000NM001G) has 5,428 drive days which is low, but they’ve been around for nearly 10 months on average.There were no out of the box failures which is a good start, but that’s all you can say. The 18TB Seagate model (ST18000NM000J) has 300 drive days and they’ve been in service for about 12 days.That’s great, but when we dig in a little we get different stories for each of the drives. There are several models with zero drive failures in the quarter. The table below covers what happened in Q3 2020. This leaves us with 150,757 hard drives in our review. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drive models for which we did not have at least 60 drives (more on that later). Quarterly Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q3 2020Īt the end of Q3 2020, Backblaze was using 150,974 hard drives to store customer data. As always, we look forward to your comments. This review looks at the Q3 2020 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers and provides a handful of insights and observations along the way. Of that number, there were 2,780 boot drives and 150,947 data drives. As of September 30, 2020, Backblaze had 153,727 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across four data centers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |