As of March 31, 2019, Backblaze had 106,238 spinning exhausting drives in our cloud storage ecosystem unfold throughout three knowledge facilities. Of that quantity, there have been 1,913 boot drives and 104,325 knowledge drives.
This evaluate seems to be on the Q1 2019 and lifelong exhausting drive failure charges of the info drive fashions at present in operation in our knowledge facilities and gives a handful of insights and observations alongside the best way.
Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q1 2019
At the top of Q1 2019, Backblaze was utilizing 104,325 exhausting drives to retailer knowledge. For our analysis we take away from consideration these drives that had been used for testing functions and people drive fashions for which we didn’t have not less than 45 drives (see why beneath). This leaves us with 104,130 exhausting drives. The desk beneath covers what occurred in Q1 2019.
Notes and Observations
If a drive mannequin has a failure price of 0%, it means there have been no drive failures of that mannequin throughout Q1 2019. The two drives listed with zero failures in Q1 had been the Four TB and 5 TB Toshiba fashions. Neither has a big sufficient variety of drive days to be statistically important, however within the case of the 5 TB mannequin, it’s a must to return to Q2 2016 to search out the final drive failure we had of that mannequin.
There had been 195 drives (104,325 minus 104,130) that weren’t included within the listing above as a result of they had been used as testing drives or we didn’t have not less than 45 of a given drive mannequin. We use 45 drives of the identical mannequin because the minimal quantity after we report quarterly, yearly, and lifelong drive statistics. The use of 45 drives is historic in nature as that was the variety of drives in our unique Storage Pods. Beginning subsequent quarter that threshold will change; we’ll get to that shortly.
The Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) for Q1 is 1.56%. That’s as excessive because the quarterly price has been since This fall 2017 and its a part of an total upward pattern we have seen within the quarterly failure charges over the previous few quarters. Let’s take a more in-depth look.
Quarterly Trends
We famous in earlier stories that utilizing the quarterly stories is beneficial in recognizing traits a couple of explicit drive or perhaps a producer. Still, you must have sufficient knowledge (drive rely and drive days) in every noticed interval (quarter) to make any evaluation legitimate. To that finish the chart beneath makes use of quarterly knowledge from Seagate and HGST drives whereas leaving out Toshiba and WDC drives as we do not have sufficient drives from these producers over the course of the final three years.
Over the final three years, the pattern for each Seagate and HGST annualized failure charges had improved, i.e. gone down. While Seagate has diminished their failure price over 50% throughout that point, the upward pattern during the last three quarters requires some consideration. We’ll check out this and allow you to know if we discover something fascinating in a future submit.
Changing the Qualification Threshold
As reported during the last a number of quarters, we have been migrating from decrease density drives, 2, 3, and Four TB drives, to bigger 10, 12, and 14 TB exhausting drives. At the identical time, now we have been changing our stand-alone 45-drive Storage Pods with 60-drive Storage Pods organized into the Backblaze Vault configuration of 20 Storage Pods per vault. In Q1, the final stand-alone 45-drive Storage Pod was retired. Therefore, utilizing 45 drives as the edge for qualification to our quarterly report appears antiquated. This is an efficient time to modify to utilizing Drive Days because the qualification standards. In reviewing our knowledge, now we have determined to make use of 5,000 Drive Days as the edge going ahead. The exception, any present drives we’re reporting, such because the Toshiba 5 TB mannequin with about 4,000 hours every quarter, will proceed to be included in our Hard Drive Stats stories.
Fewer Drives = More Data
Those of you who comply with our quarterly stories might need noticed that the whole variety of exhausting drives in service decreased in Q1 by 648 drives in comparison with This fall 2018, but we added practically 60 petabytes of storage. You can see what modified within the chart beneath.
Lifetime Hard Drive Stats
The desk beneath exhibits the lifetime failure charges for the exhausting drive fashions we had in service as of March 31, 2019. This is over the interval starting in April 2013 and ending March 31, 2019.
