How long do disk drives last?

There are extremely large difference in reliability between different drives makes and models. Here are a couple of numbers (we&#x27;re building storage servers, running 24&#x2F;24 in various environments):<p>* my company installed about 4500 Seagate Barracuda ES2 (500 GB, 750 GB and mostly 1TB) between 2008 and 2010. These drives are utter crap, in 5 years we got about 1500 failures, much worse than the previous generation (250 GB to 750 GB Barracuda ES).<p>* After replacing several hundred drives, we decided to switch boats in 2010 and went with Hitachi (nowadays HGST). Of the roughly 3000 Hitachi&#x2F;HGST drive used in the past 3 years, we had about 20 failures. Only one of the 200 Hitachi drives shipped between 2007 and 2009 failed. Most of the failed drives were 3 TB drives, ergo the 3 TB HGST HUA drives are less reliable than the 2 TB, themselves less reliable than the 1 TB model (which is by all measure, absolutely rock solid).<p>* Of the few WD drives we installed, we replaced about 10% in the past 3 years. Not exactly impressive, but not significant either.<p>* We replaced a number of Seagate Barracudas with Constellations, and these seem to be reliable so far, however the numbers aren&#x27;t significant enough (only about 120 used in the past 2 years).<p>* About SSDs: SSDs are quite a hit and miss game. We started back in 2008 with M-Tron (now dead). M-Tron drives were horribly expensive, but my main compilation server still run on a bunch of these. Of all the M-Tron SSD we had (from 16 GB to 128 GB), none failed ever. There are 5 years old now, and still fast.<p>We&#x27;ve tried some other brands: Intel, SuperTalent... Some SuperTalent SSDs had terrible firmware, and the drives would crash under heavy load! They disappeared from the bus when stressed, but come back OK after a power cycle. Oh my...<p>So far unfortunately SSDs seem to be about as reliable as spinning rust. Latest generations fare better, and may actually best current hard drives ( we&#x27;ll see in a few years how they retrospectively do).

Sysadmin here. My experience:<p>1. Infant mortality. Drives fail after a couple months of use.<p>2. 3 year mark. This is where fails begin for typical work loads.<p>3. 4-6 year mark. This is when you can expect the drives that haven&#x27;t failed earlier to fail. By this point, we&#x27;re looking at 33% fail.<p>Interesting that my experiences roughly match up with Chart 1.<p>My experiences are 10 to 15k SAS drives. Slower moving 7200rpm drives? No idea. Haven&#x27;t used them in servers in a while. They seem more of a crapshoot to me. SSD&#x27;s, thus far, are even more of a crapshoot and we don&#x27;t use them in servers and only hesitantly in desktops&#x2F;laptops and only Intel.

The hard disk drive quality has dropped over the last few years.<p>* Most consumer drives over 2TB have extremely poor reliability. Just check any Amazon or Newegg review (DOA and early mortality show up with more frequency). Yes, I know using reviews are not accurate but since there is no public information of drive failure rates there is not really much to go on.<p>* The reduction of manufacturer warranty since Thailand floods. Surprise, they never changed it back to the original 3 year warranty.<p>If you have a large array of disks, there is nothing to really to worry about. If you have a small set of drives, spend a little extra and get the &quot;Black&quot; or RE drives with 5 year warranty. Avoid any &quot;Green&quot; drive.

Managing harddrives, especially in redundant setups can be helped in one small way if you&#x27;re sure to:<p>1) select the make and model of drive you want<p>2) buy the same model of drives from multiple vendors which have different serial and build numbers.. even if you&#x27;re buying two drives, buy each from separate locations or vendors.<p>3) mix up the drives to make sure they don&#x27;t die. place stickers of purchase date and invoice number on each drive to keep them straight.<p>This all.. because when one drive goes due to a defect or hitting a similar MTBF, other ones with a close by serial number or build number can tend to die around the same time for similar reasons.<p>From owning hard drives over 8 or 9 generations of replacing or upgrading since the 90&#x27;s on all types of servers, desktops and laptops: The day you buy a new piece of equipment is the day you buy it&#x27;s death. Manage the death proactively as it gets more and more tiring to deal with it each time.

Backblaze may not know because they are &quot;a company that keeps more than 25,000 disk drives spinning all the time&quot;. After 3-5 years, you&#x27;d better have a back-up of a drive you choose to spin down. Every drive I&#x27;ve lost (in the last 10-15 years and ignoring two failed controllers subject to a close lightning strike) failed to start back up when I had powered the machine off for maintenance.

These numbers line up nicely with what I&#x27;ve experienced on much smaller scales (I&#x27;ve never personally cared about more than a few hundred spinning drives at once), which is that in a nice mix of old, middle-aged, and new drives, 5-10% go kaput each year.<p>Incidentally, about &quot;consumer-grade drives&quot;, the last time I looked into this, I was led to believe that if it&#x27;s SATA and 7200RPM (or less), there&#x27;s no hardware distinction. It&#x27;s just firmware. Consumer drives try very hard to recover data from a bad sector, while Enterprise&#x2F;RAID drives have a recovery time limit to prevent them being unnecessarily dropped from an array (which will have its own recovery mechanisms). That&#x27;s it.

I wonder how many will die before they age out of usefulness. If you&#x27;re still spinning 250Gb hard disks which are using the same power and space that a 4Tb drive could be using - it might not actually be economically sensible to keep running them.<p>Certainly the old 9.1Gb SCSI disks that were so popular 10 years ago are well past be justifiable to give power to now.

Microsoft did a metaanalysis on general hardware failure based on the error reports sent by literally millions of consumer PCs. Although the results weren&#x27;t particularly interesting (Hard drives fail the most, with rates consistent with what backblaze observed in the posted link), I was impressed by the sheer volume of data available to the study.<p><a href="http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/144888/eurosys84-nightingale.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.microsoft.com&#x2F;pubs&#x2F;144888&#x2F;eurosys84-nighting...</a>

tl;dr: Here&#x27;s some statistically significant data on how 25000 drives have worked over 4 years, please now comment on how the 3 drives you&#x27;ve owned died.

You can use default warranty information to figure out the lower bound on useful life. Companies price the value of the warranty into the product and perform statistical QA to ensure that 95%-99% of all products released will work correctly for the length of the standard warranty. Also added warranties aren&#x27;t worth the cost. Just replace the product when it breaks.

<i>If some of them live a long, long time, it makes it hard to compute the average. Also, a few outliers can throw off the average and make it less useful.</i><p>Proper statistical analysis would help you there.

Articles like this one are the reason I went with backblaze over carbonite. It may not mean their tech is any better, but it does 1) increase my confidence in them and 2) teach me something interesting each time. Both of those are, in my book, good reasons for giving them my money.

Its complicated. Here&#x27;s a link to a paper modeling disk drive failure in data centers. tl;dr: its about half a percent per 1000 hrs operation.<p><a href="http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/xin-mascots05.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ssrc.ucsc.edu&#x2F;Papers&#x2F;xin-mascots05.pdf</a>

Approximately 40 PB raw storage in our datacentres here, half of them Supermicro servers with whatever disk that came, half HP Proliant with $$$ HP Enterprise class disks, all &lt; 5 years old, so quite comparable to the Backblaze situation.<p>80% drives surviving after 5 years seems right, this is what we&#x27;re seeing as well. The hardware is decommissioned faster then the drives fail.

Does ANYONE know what hard drives Google, Facebook, and Dropbox use at their datacenters? This 2006 article says Google buys Seagate: <a href="http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2006/11/16/seagate-ceo-google-web-service-giants-upgrade-storage-almost-yearly/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tech.fortune.cnn.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;11&#x2F;16&#x2F;seagate-ceo-google-we...</a>.

Part of the problem is the move by manufacturers to have consumers basically burn-in test their products for them as cost reduction and shift the expense to retailers.

Do they plan on sharing any data on which vendors and models have the highest failure rates?

My oldest drive currently in use is the original 20MB disk on my IBM PS&#x2F;2 Model 30.

Anybody knows how long floppy disks, diskettes and their respective drives last?<p>Odd question, but I&#x27;ve always been wondering. These things just seem to hast forever.

Here&#x27;s Google&#x27;s 2007 survey.<p><a href="http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;external_content&#x2F;untrust...</a>

Ugh. Backblaze is one of those companies with an extraordinarily poor design that they flout and &quot;open source&quot; as if anyone would follow their lead. Take a look at the physical design of their system and combine that with the published data. Consider that to remove any harddrive from their setup requires physically removing a 4u rackmount storage pod from the rack. <a href="http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.backblaze.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;07&#x2F;20&#x2F;petabytes-on-a-budget-v...</a><p>Also, no hardware raid, battery, or cap.<p>Source: worked at Eye-Fi, built 2PB storage

Just out of curiosity, I wonder what the savings would amount to if this company used something like SpinRite to fix &#x2F; recover failed drives? Although I&#x27;ve never used it from what I hear its pretty good at saving drives...

It depends on the warranty period of the drive. Your hard drive manufacturer knows precisely how long the drive will last and sets their warranty period to expire right before your drive gives up the ghost.

We dont know, but backblaze sure knows how to: 1. print backblaze&#x27;s brand as often as linguistically possible in the same article. 2. Get to the top of HN over a 50 yrs old technology&#x27;s failure rate without clustering for brand spin speed density etc. (read not much)<p>Am I unaware that there are new paid spots on the first page of HN? (it would make sense I guess, from a business perspective)<p>TIA to anyone that can be of help on this, cheerio, (and good luck to Blackblaze, backblaze a path to a backblazing success!)

Damn, my last two harddrives have failed in around 3 years exactly. Did I have bad luck or am I being too mean to them? My computer is on mostly all the time and is often reading files throughout the night (for slow uploads for example). Does it make a difference how often you read&#x2F;write a drive or only the spun-up time? One died suddenly without any warning in the SMART data and the other got badblocks and started to struggle reading data.

Extremely useful info here. Most of my HDs have been running for years and still work fine, but you go online, and all you read about is that HDs are horrendously unreliable and all fail after a year or two. (manufacturer propaganda, anyone?)<p>The optical drives I&#x27;ve had, on the other hand, are actually unreliable. They all seem to break down after about four years, and I don&#x27;t use them all that often!

I think the floods has probably been a factor in reduced reliability. It took forever for prices to come down to where they were and the manufacturers are probably cutting corners everywhere to save costs. Why ramp up factories when the tech itself is on the way out?<p>I think this is most evident in the reduced warranty periods compared to before when 5 years was quite normal.

One pure storage disk I use has been alive with top S.M.A.R.T. values for over 8 years now. The one with more regular reads &amp; writes is 5 years old now. And while I have local backups I&#x27;m now finally in the progress of uploading 800GB of (semi-) important data to backblaze. I&#x27;ll probably be done in another month.

Since there seem to be backblaze staff posting in the thread, is there anyway as a &#x27;personal&#x27; (non-business) user to have multiple PCs configured with one account? Think of something like a family plan.<p>Can&#x27;t seem to find relevant information on the website anywhere for this.

It&#x27;d be very useful to have more detailed information about read&#x2F;write volume and capacity, MTBF should vary a lot depending on those. Until then I&#x27;ll keep being paranoid.

Has blackblaze budgeted for the cliff failure rate that is coming?

I was going to say, I learned about this in class! Then I read the article and the link to &quot;CMU’s study.&quot; ... My professor was one of the authors. Go Garth Gibson!

Spot on, I have experienced my drives to either fail quite soon, or &quot;never&quot;. I am still running one of my very early 40GB hard disks. It must be like 8 years old.

Not long.

Wow! Great info in here!