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It doesn't have a linear progression,' he said. 'So at first it looks correlated but it's not. At first, Budman said, the annual failure rate seemed to go up related to SMART 12 alerts, but then the failure rates leveled off and actually went down. SMART 12 relates to how many times a drive is powered up, which should correlate to long-term wear. 'SMART 1 might seem correlated to drive failure rates, but actually it's more of an indication that different drive vendors are using it themselves for different things,' he added.īudman pointed to SMART stat 12 as another example of a metric that should indicate an impending drive failure but doesn't. Western Digital uses SMART for something else - neither will tell you what it is,' Budman said. Seagate wants to track something, but only they know what that is. 'If you look at the Wikipedia entry for SMART stat 1, for example, it says 'vendor specific' value. One problem with fully understanding SMART stats, Budman said, is that drive manufacturers don't share specific details of use cases for them. SMART stat 12 relates to drives powering on, which should indicate long-term wear, but didn't, according to Backblaze. Drives with 0 uncorrectable errors hardly ever fail, Budman said, 'but once SMART 187 goes above 0, we schedule the drive for replacement.' Backblaze

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'To determine if a drive is going to fail soon we use SMART statistics as evidence to remove a drive before it fails catastrophically or impedes the operation of the Storage Pod volume,' Budman said.įor example, SMART stat 187 reports the number of reads that could not be corrected using hardware error correction code (ECC).

won't power up), it doesn't respond to console commands or the RAID system reports that the drive can't be read or written. Of that number, there were 3,760 boot drives and 203,168 data drives. SMART 197 - Current_Pending_Sector_Count.īackblaze counts a drive as failed when it is removed from a storage array and replaced because it has totally stopped working or because it has shown evidence of failing soon.Ī drive is considered to have stopped working when the drive appears physically dead (e.g. In 2021, Backblaze added 40,460 hard drives and as of December 31, 2021, we had 206,928 drives under management.SMART 187 - Reported_Uncorrectable_Errors.A value of 240 represents the amount of time that a drive spends positioning read/write heads.īackblaze's analysis of nearly 40,000 drives showed five SMART metrics that correlate strongly with impending disk drive failure:

For example, a value of '1' represents data read error rates, which are displayed as a decimal number.

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SMART software reports drive issues as normalized values, or categories, which range from SMART stat 1 to 253 (not all numbers in between are included). As they increase, annual failure rates on the drive also climb. One SMART stat that Backblaze found correlated with impending hard drive failures is 187, a stat that indicates the number of read errors that occur on a hard drive. It found that five SMART stats do predict drive failures, according to Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman. It has released that data in company blogs, highlighting which manufacturer's drives failed more often than others.īackblaze's most recent study, the results of which were also published in a company blog post, delved into SMART alerts based on the 40,000 or so hard drives the company has in its data center. Vendors can also use SMART data to analyze issues across drive lines.įor several years, Backblaze has collected data on hard drive failures.

4U Storage Pods offer 240TB of storage for 3.Due to a lack of industrywide SMART software and hardware standards, SMART data cannot be exchanged between vendor products.

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New data will be available for download shortly. This raw data is freely available from the Backblaze web-site. Statistics for each hard drive are recorded and stored in the data centre every day. One of the benefits of Seagate drives is that they generally signal their impending failure via their SMART stats, which is less predictable for other manufacturers’ drives.ġTB drives were reused for ‘burn-in’ storage pods. Nearly all of the 16,000+ drives purchased in 2015 have been Seagate drives, 85% of which are 4TB Seagate drives. In Q4 the last of 1 TB, 2TB and 3 TB drives were replaced with 4 or 6 TB drives.

StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL) OEMĭuring 2015 Backblaze data centre has expanded from 39’690 hard drives in 882 Backblaze Storage Pods to 56’224 drives in 1’249 Pods, which makes about 65 Petabytes of additional space.ĭuring 2015, five drive models were retired and removed from service.

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