How Seagate Tests Its Hard Drives
Shake Testing
Of course, there’s a lot more to drive testing than environmental test chambers. In this room, we encountered two machines dedicated to testing vibration. You see the first in the image below, a thigh-high barrel-like structure mounted on heavy-duty casters and tethered to a surprisingly large heat exhaust pipe given the size of the equipment. The reason soon becomes apparent once engineers turn it on and crank it up. The machine literally sounds like a jet engine revving for take-off. (Click through to our impromptu video clips to get a better idea.) The vibe table applies energy to the abused, attached drive in three dimensions, all controlled by the nearby workstation system, which also reads performance data from the drive during testing. As you can tell from the lack of attached power and data cables in most of the images below, engineers did not have drives in active testing while we were present.
In the screen shot below, we see the shake pattern sent to the vibration deck. Testing can be run at or above the specified product vibration frequency and pulse duration. It may not look like much in the videos, but it’s definitely “destructive” for a vibration test, particularly with a random vibe pattern. Passing and failing criteria are defined by the drive’s ability to read and write data during testing (operational) or after testing (non-operational). Different drive classes are expected to retain certain performance levels under given ambient vibration conditions. Finely controlled tests such as these are what confirm that performance.
Sometimes, engineers want to examine the impact of a specific axis of motion on drives. Enter the “slip table,” which confines motion to a single plane.
Not least of all, Seagate uses several rotary vibration tables. Clearly, these are smaller than the other machines, but they don’t have to be very large to mount a single drive and shake it about its central z-axis (perpendicular to the table surface). Rotary energy has a particularly pronounced impact on hard drives due to their internal spinning disks and the heads attempting to move across those platters in a rotary arch with minute accuracy. Rotary energy tends to kick those heads off-track, which results in no data being written or, worse, writing on an adjacent track. According to engineers, the importance of these smaller vibe tables is actually greater than their much larger cousins.
If you think that a drive mounted in a rack or PC won’t experience rotary energy interference, think again.
“Most energy gets converted to rotary because of the mechanics of the chassis and all the parts that are connected,” noted one technician. “Another source of rotary vibration can be the hard drive itself. It's doing random seeks, right? Well, that energy gets thrown into the drive base plate, which gets transmitted to the mount. That mounting scheme—it could be a hard mount, it could be isolators—will then kick that energy back into the base plate, and it can cause its own throughput hit, because it's creating a lot of rotary energy.”
This is one of the many reasons why nearline drives have accelerometers built into their PCBs. They measure rotary energy and feed the results into servo loops able to compensate and keep the drive literally on-track. Consumer class drives have no such countermeasures and will pay the performance price in the presence of vibration.
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That is an enterprise storage rack full of 2u hotswap chassis. 18 chassis, 12 drives per chassis = 216 drives @ 6tb (?) per drive = 1,296 terabytes or 1.3 Petabytes.
You could store a lot of TV shows or movies on that thing. Imagine how many of those are used for YouTube? Yikes. They get 300 hours of footage uploaded every minute.
I know IT folks that refuse to use other brands of drives as well. I know IT folks that refuse to use servers from this brand or that brand. We can find anecdotal information about anything. It does not make it true.
I've had more Seagate drives die without warning than any other brand. The only ones that have survived are some old 250GB Barracuda ES. All other models I've owned had lots of bad sectors or just stopped working before the first year, but SMART almost always says the drive is fine!
Every other drive I've ever purchased simply became obsolete due to size and thus replaced.
They should be reading about how the other drive makers do their testing and learn from that. Hahaha
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sc=1&_udlo=0&_fln=1&_udhi=200&LH_Complete=1&_ssov=1&_mPrRngCbx=1&LH_Sold=1&_from=R40&_sacat=0&_nkw=%28st31200N%2C+st32171N%2C+st32272N%2C+ST34371N%2C+st34520N%2C+st34573n%2C+st39173N%2C+st318417N%2C+st52160N%29&_sop=16
4.5 GB drives *selling* for $150+ I see a 2Gb for $120.
They must have been pretty decent at some point if SGI was putting them in their $5000-20000 workstations and people are spending $40+ per GB to get these now...
They don't LOL
It is nice to see this, but failure rates to damn high.
Of all the drives i have used, only 3 have failed in 20+ years of using PCs. 1st one was already well abused and it fried a chip on the pcb. 2nd one cooked itself because I had no clue 10k rpm drives needed active cooling and the 3rd one failed because I repeatedly dropped it on the floor.
take care of your drives and they will return the favor
Perhapps one day....however you do realize that tape drives are still used right?
Tapes are still cheaper then hard drives, are still cheaper then ssds, on a cost/TB. They are still the cheapest way to archive lots of data.
How did I know that this was going to come up.
Most IT people buy their servers, SANs etc prebuilt and typically have no choice in what brand of drives are used as that is normally decided by the OEM such as Dell, Nimble etc. We have servers with all brands. In fact so far in the year I have worked here we have had more WDs fail than Seagates or Toshibas but that does not mean the WDs are worse.
The problem is getting people to grasp the concept of using a product in an unintended environment AND, to top it off, not even mounting them properly in some cases thus making this data unusable for consumers as no consumer OEM PC or self built PC will have a improperly mounted drive in a torture environment. It is much like using Prime95 these days. Sure it is great if you want absolute maximum temps but if you run the Asus real world stress test you will have a better picture of how your system will perform.
The best thing about that is that in their Q3 report, Seagates dropped to under 6% failure rates yet WD jumped to 8%.
I also found another interesting fact, the 3TB Seagate everyone fears is a HDD that is rated for 2400 power on hours per year, it is not meant to be on 24x7. Move to the Enterprise class 3TB and guess what? It is designed and rated for 24x7 use.
It is just another flawed study of a component that is hard to put real world failure rate numbers out since there are a ton of different reasons for HDD failures due to so many different configurations and environments.
Other than that the article was very interesting.
is what this article should have been entitled. Clear attempt to co-opt Tom's to recover a reputation tarnished by awful reliability. I wonder how much advertising Tom's sold Seagate in conjunction with this article?
Backblaze's use of hard drives is neither pure server or consumer. Typically usage patterns are write the data, leave it there, rarely if ever reading it. That is the nature of cloud backup. Not withstanding backblaze's data, Seagate has form in unreliability - anyone remember the 7200.11 1tb drives - they died like flies and Seagate covered it up for ages.
the reason I'll never buy Seagate again, is how they deal with dodgy drives. I had 7200.11 drives die just outside the warranty period - Seagate refused to replace. Seagate has continued to sell drives with know failure rates of 40% - not ethical and not acceptable.
Known failure rate of 40%? Where do you get these numbers? How are these numbers obtained? What scenarios are these numbers obtained in?
BTW, did you know consumer HDDs from most brands are not rated for 24x7 operation hence why they should not be used in any server environment? It is a server environment in that it is a server with multiple HDDs running 24x7. They may not be read from all the time but they are spinning all the time and most 7200RPM HDDs will spin at 7200RPM unless they have a power saving feature.
Running a consumer drive rated for normal use, i.e. that it will be powered on and off, will result in much different failure rates.
BTW, the majority of companies will not replace a product outside of the warranty unless it is an issue affecting a massive amount of people such as a recall.
This is not the first time Toms has gone into a company to see how they do things. They did not get paid anything nor did they sell advertising to Seagate.
That's a lot of porn, lol.
So Seagate needs to make their consumer drives rate for 24x7 operation but no other company does? No other companies consumer HDDs are rated for 24x7. Just because you might keep yours on 24x7 does not mean that that drive is rated for it.
To top it off even if a consumer keeps their system on 24x7 the HDD has sleep states and is not being accessed or written to constantly like in an enterprise solution.
No HDD line is guaranteed to fail. It is just luck of the draw and the situation you put it in. If you let it get dusty and run warm it sure as hell will die a lot faster than if you kept it cool and dust free.
Failure rate is from Backblaze - 3tb Seagate drive failures in 2014 - 43.1%.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/blog-fail-drives-manufacture-2015-june.jpg
Toms reported in 2009 that the 7200.11 drives had reported failure rates of 30-40%.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-7200.11-failing,6844.html
The 7200.11 issue effected 500gb, 1tb and 1.5tb drives, with Seagate deleting posts on there forums about the issue to cover it up. Eventually Seagate offered free data recovery for effected persons, but would not replace the drives outside of warranty.
I'd say with 40% defect rate, on a hard drive where important data is held, a recall should have been done and all faulty drives replaced upon request. Nope - seagate decided to deny the issue and refuse replacements.
BTW - did you know that Backblaze uses all the major brands consumer drives in a server environment. And Seagate 3tb are the only drive that has shown catastrophic failure rates.
Also - sure Toms would not have been paid for the article, as for advertising...well that information would be commercial in confidence. But Seagate has given VIP access for Toms to have an article. Anyone asking why, would be thinking it's to improve Seagates reputation, and has given an article to Toms on a platter. it's how the PR/Media industries work and IMO pretty dodgy.