The Fallout Of Backblaze's Bogus HDD Reliability Report

[SteelCrysis]

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate...31118.html
Paul Alcorn, who wrote the Tweaktown article that debunked Backblaze, delivers the smackdown. Of course, the Backblaze fanboys/employees are attacking him in the comments.

The Backblaze HDD reliability "study" consisted of a little-known cloud storage company's internal observations of the failure rates of HDDs in its own unique environment. The Backblaze study has been both widely embraced for its open sharing of field failure rates that is typically hidden by vendors and customers alike, and also criticized because of the nature of the environment.

In short, by its own admission, Backblaze employed consumer-class drives in a high-volume enterprise-class environment that far exceeded the warranty conditions of the HDDs. Backblaze installed consumer drives into a number of revisions of its own internally developed chassis, many of which utilized a rubber band to "reduce the vibration" of a vertically mounted HDD.

The first revision of the pods, pictured above, had no fasteners for securing the drive into the chassis. As shown, a heavy HDD is mounted vertically on top of a thin multiplexer PCB. The SATA connectors are bearing the full weight of the drive, and factoring the vibration of a normal HDD into the non-supported equation creates the almost perfect recipe for device failure.

Backblaze has confirmed it still has all revisions of its chassis installed in its datacenters and that it replaced failed drives into the same chassis the original drive failed in. This could create a scenario where replacement drives are repeatedly installed into defective chassis, thus magnifying the failure ratio.

Backblaze developed several revisions of the custom chassis due to its admitted vibration problems with the early models, and the company shared the designs with the public. However, Backblaze did not indicate which type of enclosures each drive failed within, leaving speculation that the chassis may be the real root of the problem (among others).

The Backblaze environment employed more drives per chassis and featured much heavier workloads (both of which accelerate failure rates tremendously) than the vendors designed the client-class HDDs for. This ultimately helped Backblaze save money on their infrastructure. The Seagate 3 TB models failed at a higher rate than other drives during the Backblaze deployment, but in fairness, the Seagate drives were the only models that did not feature RV (Rotational Vibration) sensors that counteract excessive vibration in heavy usage models -- specifically because Seagate did not design the drives for that use case.

While the ongoing Backblaze disclosures propelled it into the public eye, the damage from the information dealt Seagate an almost immeasurable blow in the eyes of many consumers -- this, in spite of the fact that Backblaze issued numerous disclaimers about the applicability of the findings outside of its own unique (and questionable) use case. In fact, the company still has 17,000 Seagate drives in service.

The Backblaze client HDD operation was borne of necessity; it began during the Thailand floods when HDDs were excessively high priced. It is interesting to note that Backblaze has since migrated to drives that are actually designed for NAS and enterprise usage scenarios. Seagate cited information from third-party outfit Warranty Week, which examined SEC data and concluded that Seagate's drives are among the most reliable in the industry, with a 1.2 percent warranty claim as a percentage of its sales volume.

The conditions of the Backblaze failure data, even by the company's own admission, are far beyond the warranty claims of said hardware, which begs the immediate question of whether that data will pass the sniff test in court. I am no lawyer, but it should be relatively easy for Seagate to parry in this case; the results are essentially worthless to measure any practical consumer client application within the warranty guidelines.