Drive failure rates

Interesting info from BackBlaze..
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-2015/

Found them and got inspired to build a large storage server, at the time I built it 17.2TB was massive, now it can be done in four drives..

 

Interesting.
The smaller capacity drives last longer.
And my 80 GB HDD (Maxtor) is now 11 years (132 months) old.

 

OMG.. Maxtors, use to have ton of them, they went "bad" frequently the 80GB & 120's, they got real noisy, I guess I was to hard on them. I think I still might have 1 around. If your really interested in hard drives check out http://podnutz.com/category/my-hard-drive-died/

 

With a stable OS the hardware life can be the limiting factor. One of our QNX installs monitoring power has over 10 years with a Maxtor 80 attached to an Abit ST6. Over 10 years without updating, configuring, or even rebooting. It sits in a clean air conditioned room and runs 24/7 relaying data to the Windows workstations. The other five like it have all lost their hard drives and one lost a video card. In all cases the hardware failed before the OS needed any attention.

I lament the passing of reliability as a top priority in computing. :crybaby

 

It tends to be the opposite with SSDs.

Honestly, given how the SSD technology has matured and developed in the past few years, lack of funds is the only legitimate reason not to use them in computing situations where reliability is the top priority for the OS/storage drives. The speed and lower energy draw are nice bonuses, but a quality SSD's biggest advantage over spinning platters is in reliability.

 

Mimsy I totally agree +1 to reliability and +1 to price only excuse not to buy.:cool

I use Samsung 850 Pro series drives and have 2 X 1TB SSDs and 3 X 512GB SSDs and they have given me zero trouble running for 2 years 24/7.
I also still have 3 X 256GB Intel SSDs that give zero trouble and are now 4 years old and have been running 24/7 with zero trouble.

In the early days I also bought an unbranded 120GB SSD that ran continuously as the boot drive in a network server for 6 years before being replaced recently because it was too small.

The only SSDs I have ever had any problems with have been OCZ. I bought a 256GB Petrol which was replaced under warranty 4 times in 2 months then was changed over by the supplier to an OCZ Nitro 256GB which was also replaced several times before I was given my money back. The problem was always the same with these OCZ drives and the problem was that after Windows 7 was installed and was running for a day or sometimes a week without problems, suddenly and for no apparent reason, the HDD could no longer be detected by BIOS. Even after a repartition/reformat still the same problem so OCZ sent out firmware updates and several firmware patches but they didn't fix the problem long term. I also swapped the Gigabyte motherboard to ASUS in case it was a mobo/firmware issue but still the HDD problem was the same. The problem was never satisfactorily resolved by OCZ and at the time there was a load of helpful suggestions on lots of Tech forums but none worked for me and so swapping to an Intel SSD was the final solution and it is still running 3 years down the track.

I am just waiting for 4TB SSDs to become available and at a cheap enough prices as I would like 12 of these for one NAS and 7 each for two other NASs. Currently for my NASs I am using a total of 26 conventional 4 TB HGST Enterprise drives running 24/7 and they average about one drive failure every 2 years and although they are covered by a 5 year warranty it is still an inconvenience rebuilding the RAID. If they were SSD I like to think my NASs would be even more reliable and I would then take the chance and go from RAID 6 to RAID 5 thus gaining faster write performance and also gain some extra storage space.

 

Well, there's your problem. :-D

Kidding. Sort of.

OCZ's high end drives were solid, at least past the second or third generation, but I have never heard anything about their non-Vertex lines of SSDs. a few very fishy rumors here and there, and lots of bad user experiences, but never anything positive.

 

Yep OCZ Tech Support is a joke and I have to own up that it was my mistake picking the first OCZ Petrol SSD then getting talked into swapping it for an OCZ Nitro SSD by the dealer was my second mistake. Truly shouldn't have tried to save a few bucks by going cheap on these drives

Hey Mimsy, the older I get the more I realise that 20/20 hindsight is a valuable experience rolleyes

 

At another forum I used to be a member of, several of the owners of QCZ drives were happy to see the company go out of business. That's a sure sign they did something wrong...

 

I have the same feeling of those owners too although prior to the OCZ Petrol and Nitro series of drives, the dealer told me that the older Vertex series was really reliable and highly rated so not sure what changed or how OCZ got it so wrong :confused

We shouldn't let this OCZ business put a bad vibe on SSDs in general as I have not had any other trouble with either branded or unbranded SSDs and I have setup or installed over one hundred and twenty SSDs over the past 6 years ranging in size from 80GB to 1.2TB and as stated previously I am a heavy SSD user myself so have no qualms with the technology.
My wish is for 4TB or bigger SSD drives to become available and at cheap prices too........pipe dreams :major

 

Agreed. They were doing it wrong anyway.

I love my pretty SSDs... *pets the upgraded laptop* Presciousssssssss. :drool

 

Hehehehe yep same +1
My i7 Dell Inspiron 17R now has a 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSD. No real reason to upgrade as the original drive was still fine........just did it coz I could LOL

Hmmmm....... Maybe I should pet my laptop too roflmao

 

You absolutely should! Computers are people too!

 

While SSDs still cost a lot more than HDD and probably always will, if you compare SSD prices today to just a year ago, they are a lot cheaper than they used to be.

Amazon search for SSDs, 121-320GB, New, Sorted by price...

Every time someone complains about how expensive SSDs are, and later reveal they are comparing to the price of HDDs, I feel like shaking someone. That makes as much sense as it does to complain about the high prices of imported wine - fast food soda is so much cheaper and it's just not fair!

 

Question: Are you among the few companies/organisations smart enough to factor in the cost of implementing the SSDs across the board?1 5,000 upgrades don't happen overnight, especially not if you need to move data from the original HDD to the SSD as a part of the upgrade. If the amount of time and people IS needs to make this happen hasn't been factored into your report, I strongly recommend taking a look at that before actually buying the SSDs. My tech support team talks to far too many organisations who didn't think about that until it was too late...

 

My old OCZ 120GB Vertex 3 is still humming along in my ThinkPad (275/250 read/write SATAII) , and it was originally in my desktop. It was originally installed four years ago this March, and has seen over 700 days of power on time, 5.8 TB of lifetime writes, and it's still considered "Perfect" by HDSentinel. Methinks it has plenty of service life remaining.

However, the 240GB Kingston v300 that just took a crap last Sunday with little warning left me spending the entire weekend reinstalling W10, my apps, and games on a Samsung 850 Pro. Silver lining is that somehow the clean install of Win10 Pro seems to work much better than the install upgraded from W7. Or, it simply could have been the piece of crap v300.

My data drives are an old Seagate, and an old WD Caviar. Both are still going strong, but they're just data drives so they could probably last another decade with ease.

When considering long term reliability versus a mechanical hard drive, a rock solid SSD beats an HDD hands down. The most important thing is a reliable product, from a reliable vendor.

P.S. There's a deal at Newegg for a 512GB Samsung 850 Pro today only:


http://promotions.newegg.com/NEemai...id=209623&et_p1=&email64=YXpvcmtvQGxpdmUuY29t

 

You do have some good circumstances for upgrades coming up. Good luck!