Backblaze Announces HDD Operation Report for the First Quarter of 2020

Backblaze Announces HDD Operation Report for the First Quarter of 2020

Backblaze, an old-brand cloud storage provider recently announced their HDD operations in the first quarter of 2020. By the end of the first quarter, their total counted number of HDDs in the statistics has reached 129,764 blocks, which has 7257 blocks added compared with the previous report.

In this report, Seagate's ST4000DM000 has the highest failure rate. This ordinary-level HDD is not suitable for the round-the-clock machine room. Its failure rate is high when running all day long, while the same brand of enterprise Hard drives have near failure rate as well. All of the failure rates of ST8000NM0055, ST10000NM0086, ST12000NM0007, and ST12000NM0008 are high.

The HGST disk has a lower annualized failure rate during this statistical period, which is as well as the previous excellent performance. The samples of Toshiba are too small to give the reference significance, especially the MD04ABA400V.

From the statistics of the entire life cycle, the annualized failure rate of the two HDDs, ST4000DM000, and ST12000NM0007, which are much higher. Of course, this may also be caused by the relatively large sample size. It is noteworthy that Backblaze seems to have retired all Western Digital HDDs, as there are no HDDs from Western Digital on both tables.

Interestingly, they also analyzed some predictions of last year’s first quarter and reality now in this report. For example, in the first quarter of last year, they expected to use at least 20 hard drives with a 20TB capacity for testing in a year, which was not achieved. The goal that reaching a total capacity of 1EB was officially reached in March this year, but not in 2019. They expect to use at least one HAMR or MAMR hard drive, which has not been achieved either.