As of June 30, 2018 we had 100,254 spinning hard drives in Backblaze's data centers. Of that number, there were 1,989 boot drives and 98,265 data drives. This review looks at the quarterly and lifetime statistics for the data drive models in operation in our data centers. We'll also take another look at comparing enterprise and consumer drives, get a first look at our 14 TB Toshiba drives, and introduce you to two new SMART stats. Along the way, we'll share observations and insights on the data presented and we look forward to you doing the same in the comments.
Hard Drive Reliability Statistics for Q2 2018

Of the 98,265 hard drives we were monitoring at the end of Q2 2018, we removed from consideration those drives used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 45 drives. This leaves us with 98,184 hard drives. The table below covers just Q2 2018.

Swedish company EQT, which invests heavily in tech stocks, and even owns tech IP, closed a deal with Micro Focus to acquire SuSE, lock stock and barrel. Over the past 15 years, SuSE changed many owners. In 2004, the Nuremberg-based Linux distributor was acquired by Novell. In 2010, Novell was swallowed by Attachmate, with funding from Microsoft. In 2014, ten years since its original foreign acquisition, Micro Focus acquired Attachmate and spun off SuSE as a separate division within the company. EQT purchased this division from Micro Focus in a deal valued at USD $2.5 billion.

Recognizable by its quirky chameleon mascot, SuSE's biggest product is SuSE Linux, a commercial distribution of Linux for enterprises, which integrates certain proprietary software and drivers, with a business-model similar to that of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). There's also a GNU-friendly, community-maintained free distribution of SuSE called OpenSuSE, which is made entirely of free and open-source software. The acquisition of SuSE is big, not just because of its valuation, but also because certain EU-based businesses and governments use it in their vital IT infrastructure. The EQT acquisition keeps SuSE within the EU.

QSAN Technology Inc. launched XCubeFAS XF2026D, QSAN's and Taiwan's very first All-Flash SAN. This pioneer of QSAN's new AFA SAN product series is designed for SME and Large Enterprises, and is perfect for virtualization environments, big data analysis, and managing onerous applications that demand high IOPS and low latency levels. "Imagine being able to concentrate strictly on your business without the stress about complicated storage deployment and configurations," said Alex Shih, product manager of QSAN technology Inc. "With the experience of our latest smart O.S., XEVO, you can fulfill fast deployment and configurations in just a few clicks."

NVIDIA HGX-2 , the first unified computing platform for both artificial intelligence and high performance computing. The HGX-2 cloud server platform, with multi-precision computing capabilities, provides unique flexibility to support the future of computing. It allows high-precision calculations using FP64 and FP32 for scientific computing and simulations, while also enabling FP16 and Int8 for AI training and inference. This unprecedented versatility meets the requirements of the growing number of applications that combine HPC with AI.

A number of leading computer makers today shared plans to bring to market systems based on the NVIDIA HGX-2 platform. "The world of computing has changed," said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA, speaking at the GPU Technology Conference Taiwan, which kicked off today. "CPU scaling has slowed at a time when computing demand is skyrocketing. NVIDIA's HGX-2 with Tensor Core GPUs gives the industry a powerful, versatile computing platform that fuses HPC and AI to solve the world's grand challenges."

Today, AMD released the new Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Driver 18.Q2, continuing to protect the investment of IT professionals and buyers by providing significant performance improvements in leading professional applications, such as CATIA, Creo and Siemens NX, alongside enhanced security features and stability.

Our most dense storage enclosure yet, the ToughArmor MB516SP-B. With space available for 16 x 2.5" SATA / SAS drives up to 7mm in height, it fits in only two 5.25" bays, making it perfect for high density storage applications. It features our unique EZ-Slide Nano trays that make installing drives a snap, and are compatible with several other ToughArmor models such as MB998 series. Its large 80mm user-controllable fan runs quietly, utilizing its many ventilation holes for maximum airflow at minimal RPM ranges. The fan has 3 modes the user can set; high, low, and off. The MB516SP-B features a rugged heavy duty full-metal housing designed to meet high IOPS requirement which are generally found in Enterprise environments, Military systems, Medical systems, high performance computing and industrial settings.

Fujitsu Limited and Fujitsu Client Computing Limited announce the release of three new enterprise thin client models from three product series in the Fujitsu Thin Client FUTRO lineup. The new models will be steadily rolled out from the end of April in Japan. For its series of desktop-based systems, Fujitsu has added the FUTRO S740, an ultra-small model with an updated chassis design. In its notebook lineup, Fujitsu will offer the new FUTRO MU937 and the FUTRO MA576, which feature Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB, the latest OS. The Fujitsu Group remains committed to creating a secure working environment for customers with its security solutions and full lineup of devices, so users can select devices to suit various tasks and needs.

ViewSonic, Corp., a leading global provider of visual solution products, today announced a major platform update to its SC-T25 Citrix Ready workspace hub (previously known as Citrix HDX Ready Pi). Effective March 31, 2018, ViewSonic will be offering the Citrix Ready workspace hub update as a technical preview available for download on ViewSonic.com. Added workspace hub features include: beacon-based session roaming, QR code login, and Citrix Casting. Citrix Casting will enable seamless and secure session roaming from a mobile device to any display connected to the workspace hub. For the first time, with these additional tools, a wide variety of new uses are supported in the healthcare, finance, and enterprise markets.

The new Citrix Ready workspace hub update means the already popular and high- performing SC-T25 will deliver even more compelling enterprise capabilities. Using secure login credentials presented in a phone or mobile device, users can seamlessly connect to their virtual workspace, simply based on proximity to an available ViewSonic SC-T25 workspace hub device. This will eliminate the need for manual login and network authentication, providing tremendous time-saving and productivity advantages for healthcare clinicians, financial analysts, and general knowledge workers in the enterprise space.

Micron Technology, Inc. today launched the Micron 5200 series of SATA solid state drives (SSDs), maintaining industry-leading performance, consistency, capacity, reliability, and overall infrastructure value. Built on Micron's new industry-leading 64-layer 3D NAND technology, the Micron 5200 series of SSDs offers a cost-optimized SATA platform for business-critical virtualized workloads that cripple on a hard drive, such as OLTP, BI/DSS, VDI, block/object and media streaming.

Leveraging the proven architecture, performance and capacity of the well-regarded 5100 SATA SSDs, the Micron 5200 series is engineered to deliver a fast, easy and cost-effective enterprise storage solution to replace existing hard drives and legacy SSDs. Micron 5200 SSDs immediately deliver better total cost of ownership and improve data center efficiency through server and storage platform consolidation, reducing IT costs and simplifying infrastructure and maintenance. Now it is easier than ever before for enterprises to add more flash into the data center and get more out of server deployments.

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC), a committed technology leader, announces the AL15SE Series HDD, its next generation of 10,500 rpm enterprise performance hard disk drives for mission critical servers and storage. The new drive series boasts a 2,400 GB capacity model - a 33 percent capacity increase over Toshiba's AL14SE generation and Toshiba's largest capacity ever for a 10,500 rpm HDD.

Built to deliver superior low-latency performance, the AL15SE Series supports 12 Gbit/s SAS dual-port interface to optimize the host transfer rate. All models utilize a space-efficient, power-saving 2.5 inch , 15 mm form-factor. Advanced Format models support 4K native and 512e emulated sector technologies and increase areal density in capacities ranging from 600 GB to 2,400 GB and feature a 15 percent increase in sustained transfer rate over the prior AL14SE generation. New 512n sector technology models increase areal density in capacities ranging from 300 GB to 1,200 GB.

AMD has been steadily increasing output and availability of their latest take on the server market with their EPYC CPUs. These are 32-core, 64-thread monsters that excel in delivering a better feature set in 1P configuration than even some of Intel's 2P setups, and reception for these AMD processors has been pretty warm as a result. The usage of an MCM design to create a 4-way cluster of small 8-core processor packages has allowed AMD to improve yields with minimum retooling and changes to its manufacturing lines, which in turn, has increased yields and profits for a company that sorely needed a a breakout product.

Built on Intel's C621 chipset, ASUS's new WS C621E SAGE motherboard possesses some interesting traits. For a start, this workstation motherboard not only supports one LGA-3647 socket processor, but two of them in tandem. That's right. Enterprise users in need of raw processing power can drop in a pair of Intel Xeon Platinum 8180 processors and build themselves a beastly workstation with 56 cores and 112 threads at their disposal. But, what really separates the WS C621E SAGE from the competition is the motherboard's overclocking capability. Since Intel locks the multiplier for their Xeon processors, owners are accustomed to settle for factory clock speeds. However, ASUS has engineered a method to allow Xeon owners to overclock their processors to take their performance to a next level. Given the locked multiplier, we assume that overclocking is probably done through base clock adjustments.

Processing power is crucial for productivity, but having enough memory for heavy-duty tasks is equally important. For that same reason, ASUS has incorporated 12 DDR4 memory slots into the WS C621E SAGE. Users can go with either RDIMM or LR-DIMM ECC modules with speeds up to DDR4-2666. This opens the door to running 1.5 TB of memory. Now that's something you don't see everyday.

Super Micro Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI), a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, and networking solutions and green computing technology, today announced support for NVIDIA Tesla V100 PCI-E and V100 SXM2 GPUs on its industry leading portfolio of GPU server platforms.

For maximum acceleration of highly parallel applications like artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, autonomous vehicle systems, energy and engineering/science, Supermicro's new 4U system with next-generation NVIDIA NVLink is optimized for overall performance. The SuperServer 4028GR-TXRT supports eight NVIDIA Tesla V100 SXM2 GPU accelerators with maximum GPU-to-GPU bandwidth for important HPC clusters and hyper-scale workloads. Incorporating the latest NVIDIA NVLink GPU interconnect technology with over five times the bandwidth of PCI-E 3.0, this system features an independent GPU and CPU thermal zoning design, which ensures uncompromised performance and stability under the most demanding workloads.

Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) today announced at the Microsoft Ignite conference, a new device to tackle conference room complexities and help companies embrace the digital transformation of modern workspaces. The Lenovo ThinkSmart Hub 500 is a Skype Room Systems device that manages collaboration within modern meeting rooms. With the ability to simply connect remote and local participants to Skype for Business meetings and shared content, it eliminates the hassle of sharing personal laptop screens and messing about with cables. Developed in cooperation with Microsoft, the Smart Hub 500 is an all-in-one device, with a 360-degree rotatable 11.6-inch display and runs Microsoft Windows 10 IoT Enterprise.

The Smarter Office is Today
The continuing evolution of technology and the focus on digital transformation brings smarter devices to enable improved collaboration spaces and meeting environments. 92% of businesses are planning Workplace Transformation Initiatives (WTI) to build smart offices that enhance individual and collaborative work experiences for local and remote users. The exponential growth of smarter offices creates opportunities for hardware and software vendors, resellers and systems integrators as customers look to fuel investments into WTI.

We have included the full AMD presentation deck at the end, so be sure to load the entire story.

Following the global excitement generated by the launch of its new EPYC family of server processors, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today added another tier to its enterprise CPU portfolio with the introduction of AMD Ryzen PRO desktop processors. Designed to meet the demands of today's compute-intensive workplace, Ryzen PRO desktop processors will bring reliability, security, and performance to enterprise desktops worldwide.

"Today marks another important step in our journey to bring innovation and excitement back to the PC industry: the launch of our Ryzen PRO desktop CPUs that will bring disruptive levels of performance to the premium commercial market," said Jim Anderson, senior vice president and general manager, Computing and Graphics Group, AMD. "Offering a significant leap in generational performance, leadership multi-threaded performance, and the first-ever 8-core,16-thread CPU for commercial-grade PCs, Ryzen PRO provides a portfolio of technology choices that meet the evolving needs of businesses today and tomorrow." Ryzen PRO Lineup Delivering breakthrough responsiveness for the most demanding enterprise-class applications and multi-tasking workflows, the 'Zen' core in every Ryzen PRO processor provides up to 52 percent improvement in compute capability over the previous generation, and the Ryzen 7 PRO 1700 offers up to 62 percent more multi-threaded performance than select competing solutions.

G.SKILL International Enterprise Co., Ltd., the world's leading manufacturer of extreme performance memory and gaming peripherals, is thrilled to announce its largest annual LN2 extreme overclocking events at Computex - the 6th Annual OC World Record Stage 2017 and 4th Annual OC World Cup 2017. In addition, an Extreme OC Workshop event co-hosted with HWBOT.org at the G.SKILL booth this year. These 3 events will be held throughout Computex week at the G.SKILL Computex booth in the Nangang Exhibition Hall, 1F, Booth J0806.

The G.SKILL OC World Record Stage event has reached its 6th year in the running and has become one of the biggest annual overclocking events in the community. This year, 18 world-class professional overclockers will be attending and aim to break as many benchmark records as possible, showing off the astounding performance of the latest hardware from Intel, leading motherboard vendors, and G.SKILL.

Intel today unveiled significant performance advances in its upcoming Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family. At the SAP Sapphire NOW conference, Intel showed up to 1.59x higher Intel Xeon processor performance running in-memory SAP HANA workloads over the generation it replaces, demonstrating what the new products will deliver to help meet the increasingly complex demands of big-data, in-memory workloads in the modern data center.

Diane Bryant, group president of the Data Center Group at Intel, outlined how the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family - available in mid-2017 - will provide enhanced performance to in-memory applications like SAP HANA. This will provide customers faster time-to-insight and allow organizations to rapidly respond to change.

Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:MU) today introduced the Micron SolidScale architecture, an integrated platform that delivers breakthrough low-latency and high performance access to compute and storage. The Micron SolidScale architecture provides customers with the agility to deploy next-generation, cloud-native applications while supporting legacy applications that run the enterprises of today - and tomorrow. From online transaction processing, to virtual platforms and analytics, to machine learning, Micron's innovative architecture not only delivers data quickly due to its extremely high throughput, but it delivers faster time to results because of its unprecedented low latency.

"We estimate that companies using NVMe SSDs deployed in application servers today are on average using less than 50% of their IOPS and capacity. With the new Micron SolidScale architecture, capacity is shared across application servers, unlocking capacity customers have already paid for so that they can do more with less and unleash flash's true performance," said Darren Thomas, vice president, Storage Business Unit, Micron Technology, Inc. "At Micron, we consider the impact of every workload, application and environment as we design the technology, products and systems that allow our customers to deploy applications faster and scale without limits."

Samsung Electronics America, Inc. today announced pre-order sales and availability of Samsung Galaxy Book 12 with Windows 10 Pro, a 2-in-1 device that offers highly mobile workforces style, performance and productivity. Galaxy Book will be available for pre-order through select resellers beginning April 21 for $1429, which includes an S Pen and Keyboard Case, as well as Samsung's enterprise solutions, services and support. Device shipments will begin May 23.

"We see tremendous growth and potential for 2-in-1s in the enterprise, particularly in vertical markets like sales, finance, healthcare and retail industries where users move frequently between collaboration and productivity mode," said Kevin Gilroy, executive vice president of enterprise mobility at Samsung Electronics America. "Galaxy Book helps Windows 10 Pro users make an impression with a stylish and flexible device that's backed by the power, security and reliability of our Galaxy foundation."

Toshiba Corporation's Storage & Electronic Devices Solutions Company today announced the addition of an 8 TB SATA model to its MG05 series of 3.5-inch form-factor, enterprise capacity class of hard disk drives (HDD). Shipments start from today. Alongside the expansion of IoT (Internet of Things) and the spread of cloud services, the volume of data generated and accumulated continues to increase, and higher-capacity, higher-performance HDDs are constantly required in cloud data centers and their storage systems.

To meet these requirements, the new 8 TB model offers an approximately 33% increase in maximum capacity from the 6 TB of the prior MG04 series. It also delivers an approximately 12% increase in sustained data rate to 230 MB/s and an approximately 42% improvement in MTTF to 2,000,000 hours. These improvements in capacity, speed and reliability can contribute to the reduction of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of the system.

SanDisk today announced the SkyHawk and SkyHawk Ultra lines of enterprise SSDs. Built in the 12 mm-thick 2.5-inch form-factor, the drives feature PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface over U.2 or SATA-Express connections. The drives incorporate high-endurance 15 nm MLC NAND flash memory. The SkyHawk series includes 1920 GB and 3840 GB variants, and offer transfer speeds of up to 1500 MB/s reads, with up to 1700 MB/s writes; up to 250,000 IOPS 4K random reads, and up to 47,000 IOPS 4K random writes. Its MTBF is rated at 2 million hours, and it is backed by a 5-year warranty.

The more premium SkyHawk Ultra series comes in 1600 GB and 3200 GB variants, with sequential transfer speeds of up to 1700 MB/s reads, and up to 1200 MB/s writes, up to 250,000 IOPS random reads, with up to 83,000 IOPS random writes. These drives offer nearly triple the durability of the SkyHawk (standard) series, with 1.7 DWPD (vs. 0.6 DWPD of the SkyHawk standard); although their MTBF are rated the same, at 2 million hours, and are backed by the same 5-year product warranties.

Alongside the new WX hardware products, the WX4100, 5100 and 7100, AMD also revealed a new software initiative aimed at enterprises. The most important part is continued, issue-free usage of hardware solutions, but AMD stands to take a two-pronged attack: through performance-enabling hardware, as well as stable, predictable, and robust software solutions.