8TB Drives Are Highly Reliable, Says Backblaze

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Yahoo News: Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze has published its hard drive stats for Q2 2016. Yahoo News reports: "The report is based on data drives, not boot drives, that are deployed across the company's data centers in quantities of 45 or more. According to the report, the company saw an annualized failure rate of 19.81 percent with the Seagate ST4000DX000 4TB drive in a quantity of 197 units working 18,428 days. The next in line was the WD WD40EFRX 4TB drive in a quantity of 46 units working 4,186 days. This model had an annualized failure rate of 8.72 percent for that quarter. The company's report also notes that it finally introduced 8TB hard drives into its fold: first with a mere 45 8TB HGST units and then over 2,700 units from Seagate crammed into the company's Blackblaze Vaults, which include 20 Storage Pods containing 45 drives each. The company moved to 8TB drives to optimize storage density. According to a chart provided in the report, the 8TB drives are highly reliable. The HGST HDS5C8080ALE600 worked for 22,858 days and only saw two failures, generating an annualized failure rate of 3.20 percent. The Seagate DT8000DM002 worked for 44,000 days and only saw four failures, generating an annual failure rate of 3.30 percent." For comparison, Backblaze's reliability report for Q1 2016 can be found here.