Backblaze statistics: determine the best HDD in the 2nd quarter of 2016

The report first appeared HD 8 tb

Backblaze company published a statistical report on the use of hard drives for the second quarter of 2016. It is remarkable that it first appeared data on disks with a capacity of 8 TB. The manufacturer of these HDDs is Seagate.



The number of hard drives used by the company is constantly growing. In 2013, there were 27,134 disks in the Backblaze data center. As of December 31, 2014, there were 41 213 disks. In the first quarter of this year - 61 590 HDD. Now the report provided by the company includes data on 68,813 hard disks of different sizes and different manufacturers.





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Notes on the table:

1. For several models, the annual failure rate is 0.00%. They had no failures in Q1 2016;

2. The annual failure rate is calculated as follows: ((Failures) / (Work days / 365)) * 100. In some cases, you should carefully look at the number of failures and work days to see why the ratio turned out to be one way or another.



The “Drive Days” is calculated quite simply - as many days as the disk is in the system in a healthy state. For example, if the hard drive was installed on July 1, and he refused on August 31, then the “Drive Days” indicator is 62 days with 1 failure in the “overall”. The disk can be removed from the system and to replace the HDD with a larger volume and without failure. Anyway, the number of “Drive Days” is added to the total number, even if there are no failures.



The company's specialists consider faulty disks that are not included or not recognized by the OS, or the disk is not synchronized or does not store synchronization in the RAID array. Another option is the unacceptable values ​​of SMART statistics.



In the data for the first quarter of this year, 8-TB disks were indicated. But then there were very few of them , only 45 pieces, this is too small a sample to draw any conclusion.







Now the company has purchased several thousand such disks at once (2,700), and the sample is already large enough to draw certain conclusions. In this model, HDD with a capacity of 8 TB uses a SATA 6 Gb / s interface. Form factor - 3.5 inches. Storage Pods have 45 new disks installed, storage systems are deployed in Backblaze Vaults. The company says that in the third quarter, 8 TB drives will become even larger. According to Backblaze specialists, larger disks have been decided to be purchased in order to increase the efficiency of using the space occupied by data storage systems. In a single Storage Pod, you can now store double the amount of data if you use 8 TB drives instead of 4 TB.



In this quarter, it was decided to abandon work with 2 TB HGST disks, whose age reached 64 months. In total, the data centers of the company have 85 Storage Pods with 2 TB disks. Replacing HDD is a gradual process during which storage systems with such disks will remove several pieces per day. For replacement of disconnected systems, new ones are connected, with disks of increased volume. Now the company has been able to replace half of the 2 TB systems with a Storage Pod with larger hard drives.



HGST discs with a volume of 2 and 3 TB have proven to be very good at work. The percentage of failures is only 1.6% and 0.8%, respectively, for disks of the indicated volumes. The manual says that they even feel a bit sorry for the old systems, which for a long time served faithfully.

And how much data does Backblaze store?

It turns out that the amount of information stored in the company's data centers is already 250 petabytes. Of these, 50 petabytes have been accumulated in just the last 2 quarters. The company crossed the 250 petabyte mark in mid-June.

What are the best HDDs?

Breakdown by model

Disks that are used in the company

The company gradually refuses Toshiba and Western Digital hard drives, as there were many problems with them. And it's not their reliability, but the fact that Backblaze uses a lot of disks, lots of 5,000-10,000 copies are constantly required. Transactions with Western Digital often fail, and Toshiba, in the opinion of the company's specialists, does not offer solutions with an optimal price / quality ratio.



The 8 TB disks are still keeping up pretty well, but little time has passed since the beginning of their use, so conclusions on their reliability can be made no earlier than in a quarter or even a year.



For reference: Backblaze Company specializes in online backups. With the help of the service, users upload backup copies of their data to the cloud in the company's data center.