Who makes the most reliable hard drives?

A few months ago we asked and answered one of computing’s oldest questions: How long do hard drives actually last? That story missed one vital piece of information, though — who makes the most reliable hard drives? Well, we can now answer that question too.
Just like last time, this information comes from Backblaze, an all-you-can-eat online backup company. Backblaze currently has around 28,000 hard drives powered up and constantly spinning, storing a total of around 80,000 terabytes (80 petabytes) of user data. As you can imagine, it is very much in Backblaze’s interests to ensure that it buys reliable hard drives. Every time a drive fails, it takes considerable time and effort to pull the drive, slot in a new one, and rebuild the RAID array.

Which hard drive manufacturer is the most reliable?

Backblaze breaks down its data in two ways — by manufacturer, and by specific drive. The data is fairly complex, but we’ll try to break it down into morsels of easy-to-digest, actionable information. (Read: How a hard drive works.)
As of the end of December 2013, Backblaze had 12,765  Seagate drives, 12,956 Hitachi drives, and 2,838 Western Digital drives. These drives are not all the same age — some are almost four years old, while many were installed in the past year. The odd numbers are because Backblaze basically buys whatever drive offers the most competitive dollar-per-gigabyte ratio, with reliability being a secondary factor. For most of the last four years, Seagate and Hitachi have offered the best price-per-gig, with Western Digital Red drives only now becoming a viable option for Backblaze.

Hard drive annual failure rate, broken down by maker (Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital) and size

As you can see from the graph above, Hitachi drives are by far the most reliable. Even though most of Backblaze’s Hitachi drives are now older than two years, they only have an annual failure rate of around 1%. The “annual failure rate” is the chance of a drive dying within a 12-month period. After three years of being powered up 24/7, 96.9% of Hitachi drives are still running.
Western Digital is slightly worse, but still impressive: After three years of operation, 94.8% of Western Digital drives are still running. Backblaze lists the annual failure rate of the WD drives at around 3% (I don’t think the numbers quite add up, but I could be wrong).
Seagate drives are not very reliable at all. As you can see in the second graph below, Seagate drives are fine for the first year, but failures quickly start building up after 18 months. By the end of the third year, just 73.5% of Backblaze’s Seagate drives are still running. This equates to an annual failure rate of 8-9%.

Hard drive failure rate, plotted by month

In Backblaze’s words: “If the price were right, we would be buying nothing but Hitachi drives. They have been rock solid, and have had a remarkably low failure rate.”

Which single hard drive is the most reliable? (And which is the least?)

In general, then, if you want a reliable hard drive you should go for a Hitachi or Western Digital. If you’re looking for a specific drive model that has good longevity, the numbers break down interestingly.
The two best drives, with 0.9% annual failure rate over more than two years, are the Hitachi GST Deskstar 5K3000, and Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000. Get one of these drives and you’re almost guaranteed (97-98%) to make it through three years without a dead drive. If you want a 4TB drive, the Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 is your best bet — it has a slightly higher failure rate, but still below WD and Seagate’s offerings.
As far as poor reliability goes, Seagate has some nasty offenders. The 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 (an old drive now) has a very high chance of failing after three or four years. Even the newer 3TB Seagate Barracuda has a pretty high failure rate, at 9.8% per year.
Backblaze also notes that some drives (the Western Digital Green 3TB and Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB) start producing errors as soon as they’re slotted into a storage pod. They think this is due to the large amounts of vibration caused by thousands of other hard drives. (They also think that their aggressive spin-down setting, which is ostensibly to save power, causes a lot of wear to the drive.)
Hit up Backblaze’s website for a full list of hard drives and their statistics.

Samsung and Toshiba

Unfortunately, Backblaze doesn’t have a statistically significant number of Samsung or Toshiba drives installed. Even so, because Samsung’s hard drive division was acquired by Seagate in 2011, it’s hard to say if an older, pre-acquisition Samsung drive would be more or less reliable than a post-acquisition drive. Toshiba/Fujitsu still have a reasonable wedge (~10%) of the market share pie, but unfortunately we’ll have to wait for another study to see how they compare to Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi.
On the topic of acquisitions, you may also remember that Western Digital acquired Hitachi GST almost two years ago. If we compare Hitachi drives from before and after the acquisition, the annual failure rate seems to stay the same (around 1%). It would seem that Western Digital and Hitachi have the reliable hard drive business sewn up — and this is before we’ve had a chance to see what WD/HGST’s helium-filled hard drive can do!

AMD beats earnings estimates thanks to console sales, but APU outlook is bleak

After Intel missed its earnings expectations last week and predicted that 2014 would be a flat year for the company, eyes have been watching Sunnyvale to see how AMD’s sales would break. Historically, Intel has been the bellwether of the semiconductor industry; a bad quarter for Intel typically means AMD is headed off a cliff. This time was different.
For Q4 2013, AMD reported income of $1.59 billion, up 9% from Q3 and 38% year-on-year. Total yearly sales were $5.3 billion (down 2% from the whole of 2012), but gross margins hit 37%, far higher than 2012′s 23%. This wasnt’ enough for AMD to return to full profitability — Sunnyvale still posted a loss of $83 million for the whole of 2013 — but a net income of $89 million in the fourth quarter and earnings per share of 0.12 both beat industry expectations.
The company’s strong sales and overall position are thanks to its surging graphics revenue from its console business and new Radeon sales. In fact, if this were focused solely on computing solutions, the story there is abysmal. Take a look at how AMD’s market shifted in 2013…

AMD’s graphics business surged just as the bottom fell out of APUs. Kaveri may help reverse this trend, depending on uptake, but that’s still unknown territory. AMD claims that adoption of Kaveri, Mullins, and Beema are all strong, but wasn’t ready to name partner names for future product shipments on the latter two parts. Kaveri should ship in desktop systems in the near future, with mobile Kaveri arriving later this year. Beema and Mullins will ship in the back half of the year, which is when we’ll see any gains in tablets and low-cost laptop segments.
This neatly captures both the success of AMD’s new strategy and the difficulty of holding on to that success if the APU business doesn’t start to recover. The bottom may have fallen out of the PC market as a whole, but AMD ate a far higher percentage of that decline than Intel did. According to AMD, the decline in APUs was driven by “decreased chipset and notebook unit shipments.” GPU revenues increased sequentially thanks to the launch of new R7 and the R9 produt families, but AMD doesn’t break out exactly how much ASPs or GPU shipments were up last quarter.
Finally, AMD will pay Global Foundries $250M in the first quarter of this year. as part of the 2014 WSA. It missed its wafer purchases in Q4 2013 (960M worth of wafers instead of $1.15B for the year), but did not incur a penalty for this shortfall.

Looking ahead to 2014

AMD’s 2014 roadmap shows a steep decline in Q1 of this year with sales dropping an estimated 16%. That’s a greater-than-typical seasonal decline; it reflects an increased drop-off on console sales as those products move out of Q4, combined with the normal seasonal decline in PC sales. Overall, AMD expects the PC space will decline in 2014,  The company’s plans for the year as a whole won’t be surprising to anyone who follows it — the company believes it can derive as much as 50% of its revenue frm the non-PC space, it plans to launch ARM servers later in 2014, and it’s bullish on the ramp of its refined Kabini hardware.
Underneath the marketing there’s a message: AMD doesn’t want to just be a PC company anymore, and it’s well aware of the dangers of clinging to strongly to a semicustom business based solely on console parts. That’s why the focus in the semicustom space is built on pushing AMD hardware into new low power and embedded markets, and its why AMD wants to capitalize on its SeaMicro business with a new ARM part. That part will be ready to sample by the end of the quarter (AMD claims it has strong interest).
AMD CEO Rory Read did what he said he’d do. He’s returned AMD to profitability. With the PC market still in flux, it’s not clear if this will remain true, and we remain convinced that Steamroller is the wrong core for AMD’s long-term success — but we’ve got to give credit where credit is due. While AMD isn’t out of the woods at this juncture, it’s come a long way from 2012.
AMD’s stock has fallen some 10% since this earnings news broke — Wall Street evidently isn’t satisfied with these figures, despite strong growth, better-than-expected earnings, and a net income of $89M for the last quarter.