Solved New HDD - Toshiba 16 TB - But Backblaze article came out = Bad drive...?

[Tommmi]

Hello

Im in the process of choosing a new HDD, i had some drives in mind, but on some forum i was recommended even bigger and "better" drive for the same price - Toshiba 16TB, MG08ACA16TE. I liked it a lot from all the descriptions... But just few days ago new Back Blaze article about their HDD failure rates for 2022 came out

Backblaze Drive Stats for 2022

Check out the 2022 year-end Drive Stats data, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

www.backblaze.com

And I by pure accident came across it. What was my surprise when i saw that my new choice is among them - MG08ACA16TE.

And it doesnt look good... Although the drive SHOULD be GOOD (has 5 years warranty, 2.5 milion MTBF etc...) , BUT... according to the REAL WORLD samples/stats, it doesnt really look good... They have like 6000 of these (!) so the numbers that they give should give you a good idea about that HDD in general (if they had only 2 drives, who cares, 6000 drives is according to me a good sample size to make a judgement). They ran only for like a year (14,7 months) and ALREADY (!) they have AFR of 1,57% (!). Thats like almost the worst (if not WORST) number of all the drives with similiar "age" they have...

According to this:

https://storage.toshiba.com/docs/enterprise-hdd-documents/ehdd-mg08_product-overview_rev-3.pdf

The AFR should be (is stated that it is): 0,35%... And JUST in the 1st year of REAL WORLD USAGE (with 6000 samples (!) ) showed the real world AFR of 1,57%, thats like 4.5 times more than it should be...
So... this drives appears to be a BAD drive... right? And i should NOT go for it in light on these newly revealed real life "tests"...? Or is it possible that this drive just fails more in the first year and THAN it stabilizes its AFR on a much better number...? According to my understanding, if a drive exhibits unexpectedly high failure rate for the 1st year, its safe to assume, the failure rate will NOT get any better with years passing...?

Correct?

What would you thought about these revelations about the drive...? From all i know about PC HW and HDDs it appears to me, that this is a bad drive... (?) (in terms of reliability)

Thank you

 

[Bruce]

one Seagate was 3.4% and another 5.7%, making your 1.5% look much better!
so yeah, 1.5% seems high, but who of us here have not bought some electronic gadget after much saving and researching only to have it found cheaper and with bad reviews just weeks later.

some things to consider,

• what are their 'real world tests'. they say they tested (or in their words 'managed') 235,000 units. sorry, but who has a lab so big that they can connect over a quarter of a million drives and run them for over 12 months. so maybe they outsource it and actually use peoples personal PC's across the country. but if they base their figures solely on using their two data centres, than in no way is that a real world test
• it's fine to give failure rates but that needs to be compared with units sold. like, they say WDC had the least failure rates and Seagate the worst, but if only two WD's were tested compared to 1000 Seagate's than you can't compare those figures
• thanks to COVID, for the last three years all drives have had much more usage than usual, so expect all figures (sales, returns, failures, etc ) to be skewed accordingly.

in short, stats are awesome - they can be twisted to show whatever opinion you are trying to promote.
and unless you are comparing apples with apples - the whole process is tarnished.

 

[phillpower2]

Being that the OP has revisited the forum but chose not to reply this thread will be marked and closed.