Backblaze lists SSD failure rates, they die faster than HDDs in lifetime

How "SSD die faster than HDD" when data shows otherwise?

 

In twenty years the only drive that failed me was an IBM 120 GXP "Deathstar" - well know for the high failure rates and the reason why IBM exited consumer HDD market - other than this HDD's or SSD's never failed on me - the only reason for change was capacity upgrade or speed - I may be lucky but I put them to a lot of use both at home and work with simulations and code compiling...also no failures on my NAS with 4 HDD that I use for torrents, surveillance cam hub and file sharing between office and home.

The data is maybe true for storage warehouses but I think that for the consumer market this is irrelevant.

 

Have tons of SSDs over the years and none failed yet. But they are not in storage servers as in backblaze conditions. Failed HDDs over the years involve Maxtor, Seagate and WD to a lesser extent. But these mostly were older smaller, less than terabyte capacity from back in the day.

 

my brother had 3 wd blue 750 gb die pretty much instantly ... most likely a bad batch ... literally the drives went " Click click GRRRR click click ...dead ... " the only thing i can imagine is a bad batch our solution on our third return was to get the 750gb model from seagate instead ..that drive is working to this date ! (( i was servicing his pc at the time ))

 

When come to massive volume there is the price to still consider (unit and the infrastructure as the SSD have lower volume than HDD).
So, it is better for SSD, but HDD still have a bright future...

 

2 out of 3 my WD black died in less than a year probably a bad batch also but I never bought them again they cost a premium and you get this ? no thx
1 WD blue died in a friend's laptop also after like 2 years
I mostly run HGST or WD/HGST "ultrastar" in raid on my server (WD bought them a few years ago but the drives sold under WD still have the HGST part ID in disk info)
I also have a few WD red in 2-4 drives raids that work fine

I can't scare you enough about seagate ironwolf they make an insane noise, insane it sounds like metal work, grinding or something, unbearable really you can hear it 2 rooms away and they click nonstop nonstop
just buy "WD" (really HGST) ultrastar 100% you'll be happier I know I've got 18 of them running less than 2m away lol and I barely hear them

this is the kind of noise ironwolf do and you can hear that 5+ meters away it's impossibly unbearable to be in the same room they are, it also sounds way more sharp igher pitched and aggressive in real life, another product like awful ghosting "gaming monitors" that shouldn't be allowed to be sold
maddening idle sound at 9:00 yes the head constantly clicks unless you turn the drive off
metal work aka copying at 10:00

guy is only running one I had 4 in raid I couldn't believe my ears that this product is sold to customers
again I'm now running 18 drives 18 ! and I can't hear them at idle and barely in use WD Ultrastar ftw

 

So I must be very luck - 4 seagate ironwolf in my NAS, two in my two home desktop computers, six at work and not a problem in three years...
Also 3 WD Black edition (2TB) with not a problem until now...
SSD's - only Samsung (Sata and NVMe) and two WD Black SN 850 - all at 99 or100% life

 

I can confirm, two SSD's died on me in last 8 months (Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB, they just had around 10TB written), while HDD died just once after 5 years, but I still went with a SSD and HDD mix, SSD for OS and newer games, HDD for everything else, hope it last at least two years..

 

In my 30 years of building PCs, I've only had four drives die on me. A Seagate in 1992, a Quantum Fireball in 1999 and two SSDs, an OCZ and a Kingston. I've had one WD (HGST) Gold drive DOA. As of now, the oldest drive I have in my PCs is a WD Black 2TB that is about 10 years old. I guess I've been rather lucky.

 

About the noise i confirm, specialy the stressing "Tssssseeeeee... Toc" that they do sometime.
But on other hand at work we go from WD to Seagate few years ago, at 1st for 4 units and now on the 26 units for our servers.
They are less expensive, for the same price we have more RPM and seem to be really secure for now: a nice product.

WD/HGST is just the total pro brand of WD (with the SAS connectivity for most of them), same as Sandisk for the pro WD's SSD.

*Edit* i still have an eldest WD HDD 1g that still work (with Dos on it lol) should be dead since last millenium but still alive lol

 

They Don't Make Them Like They Used To...

 

all of my spinners were Hitachi Ultrastars post 2008.
but i ditched 12 hdd array for 6 SSD array for reliability, noise, and power consumption. now i don't need my NAS in a closet down the hall, it's on a shelf next to my main rig.

one thing to note, the SSD failures that are being noted are old TLC very very few are 3d nand

 

Data does not lie,the results are interesting for sure.The results go against everything I experienced as a end user over 10 years. No SSD failures and HDD failures a few.

 

I was having regular drive failures until 2 things happened:

1) stopped powering my machine down at night, left it on 24/7, and left drives permanently running.
2) only bought Hitachi NAS or Helium drives (or SSDs for boot). Advice for the Hitchi drives was taken from Backblaze reports.

Since then, the only problem I had was about 3 years ago when my CPUs cooling failed which corrupted a Hitachi 6TB NAS drive.
Using good recovery tools I got almost everything back, reformatted the drive, its still running great 24/7.
The worst drives (apart from glass platter IBM Deathstars) were Samsung Spinpoint 1TB, they snuffed it within 1 to 2 years.
Oh and an early OCz 256GB SSD, bad sectors started appearing but it remained serviceable until replaced with a Samsung 840 Pro.

The best drives have been anything HGST, 2x NAS from 2015, 3x Helium from 2018.
All run flawlessly. Bear in mind these run 24/7, very few heat/cool cycles. A fan blows over them.
Sadly WD bought HGST so I dont know how much faith can be put in more recent designs.

 

the thing with SSDs is that they tend to drop dead with no warning, spinning rust usually dies a very agonizing death so you can backup way ahead

someone told me its due to cheap controllers, nand itself dies very slowly, but I'm willing to bet 9 out of 10 drives out there have "cheap controllers" anyway

 

Nearly nothing have changed, only the low SATA version that are rebranded WD gold for the fast one and WD red for the slow (but at HGST price of course lol), the SAS and the regular one are still build for pro (mean the WD evolution will be bring only when proved reliability).

 

the same HGST enterprise designs are being manufactured by WD today, the Golds so long as you perform due diligence are exactly the same physically and 99% of firmware the same as HGST.

I must stress the due diligence though, there is two models of the 4TB gold in the market right now that correspond to 2 completely different HGST drives.

WD4002FYYZ and WD4003FRYZ

WD4002FYYZ is based on the Ultrastar 0B35950 and is 512n and performs at up to 233MB/s
the WD4003FRYZ is the newer spec drive based on the Ultrastar 0B36040 and is 512e and performs up to 255MB/s

The older of the two has user reports of being noiser than the newer.

neither require modifying the sata plug/cable to turn off "Power Disable"

PS: Gold 4TB's are significantly faster than Black 4TB's.

Gold


Black


There is a slight mistake in the pdf at https://documents.westerndigital.co...a-sheet-ultrastar-sata-series-2879-810017.pdf where the 0B36040 512e is reported as 233MB/s

This is the expected throughput of a 0B36040 using 512n, the pdf here has the correct throughput.

 

Pretty much everything in this post is pure rubbish...
- I can't comment on your experience with WD black drives, but you have to be extremely unlucky with your choices, because I have 4 of them, some older than 8 years and all are running without a single issue.
- And that nonsense about Ironwolf... I have a 6TB version and that drive is as noisy as every other 7200rpm drive there is. The WD Black I have next to it is actually even louder. If you have some "clicking" noises during idle, then your disk is switching between idle (a,b,c) states and parking/unparking its heads. This happens when some app or OS makes a small op, wakes the disk up and then leaves it for a few seconds. If you have this kind of scenario, simply download SeaChest tools and use SeaChest_PowerControl to disable the idle state which is causing it.

 

I gotta be honest with all of you, your personal experiences with like 8 drives don't mean anything.