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Backblaze-StoragePods

For the last few years, the deject backup provider Backblaze has published data on its hard drive usage and reliability stats. While information technology'southward ever of import to take these kinds of reports with a grain of common salt, Backblaze's previous reports have been a good manner to measure out whether drive failures are increasing or decreasing, and how various drive families are performing over time as they age out. Contempo data from the company suggests that while Seagate 8TB enterprise drives may have several features that prepare them apart from their consumer-grade counterparts, reliability may non be amidst them.

Before we hit the data, let's talk some background. One of the difficulties of drawing on Backblaze's data when investigating bulldoze reliability is that consumer and enterprise drives are designed for unlike workloads and may have different components or supported operating conditions. Hard drive manufacturers become to the trouble to spec these drives with different capabilities, subsequently all, and this could have meant that some consumer drives fail more quickly when tasked with enterprise-form workloads, while enterprise drives might prove more than reliable in these same conditions.

BblazeHDD

To be clear, this could still be the case–just thus far, it doesn't seem to be true when comparing two specific models of Seagate 8TB HDD. The Seagate ST8000NM0055 enterprise 8TB bulldoze had a 1.2 percent annualized failure rate throughout Q3 2017, while the Seagate ST8000DM002 consumer drive showed a 1.1 per centum annualized failure rate through the aforementioned menses.

According to Seagate's product documentation, at that place are some significant differences in the reliability ratings for the two drives. Seagate claims that the consumer 8GB drive (ST8000DM002) will have a not-recoverable read error every 1*tenfourteen bits, while the enterprise drive (ST8000NM0055) is projected to have an fault every ane*tenxv bits. The consumer bulldoze is rated for less than 55TB of writes per year, while the enterprise drive is listed as supporting 550TB per twelvemonth.

Now, with that said, there are definitely features that the enterprise drives offering. Backblaze notes its enterprise drives load data faster and store information technology more quickly as well. They besides have an selection, PowerChoice Technology, that gives end-users the power to tweak the drive to consume less power. Backblaze noted that its enterprise drives stored upward to 40 per centum more data in the same corporeality of time equally the consumer models (140TB versus 100TB) even with this power-saving mode enabled. Enterprise drives also carry a five-year warranty, as opposed to a two year warranty.

There are a lot of potential explanations for these trends. Maybe the enterprise drives volition testify more reliable over a longer period of time. While Seagate absolutely emphasizes the loftier reliability of its enterprise products, it could argue it also markets them as having other features of import to enterprise customers, like on-drive self-encryption, the same PowerChoice (reduces power and cooling requirements while idle) and technologies Backblaze doesn't refer to, like PowerBalance (optimizes IOPS/watt under load).

Hard drive specs and data sets are notoriously difficult to gather, which is why data sets like Backblaze'southward are valuable in the outset place. And manufacturers don't exactly make it easy to compare long-term reliability data on 1 drive model with another. If I had to pick, I'd much rather come across consumer drives congenital to enterprise reliability but with fewer enterprise features, than a scenario where consumers have to pay enterprise-level prices for decent reliability.

Hat tip to THG for calling out the information.