Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#1

Post by sashk » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018
backblaze.com

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#2

Post by alinde » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

Would be interesting to also have metrics on failure per TB storage.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#3

Post by krob » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

HGST look like the best, but they don't have the quantities of the Seagate, makes me wonder if these numbers are skewed :/

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#4

Post by samstave » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

BackBlaze spent ~12 million dollars on 12TB Seagate drives (at full retail)

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#5

Post by theandrewbailey » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

alinde wrote: post #2

Would be interesting to also have metrics on failure per TB storage.

I'm not sure how that would be useful, since terabytes don't fail. When a drive fails, it's effectively a brick with no terabytes.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#6

Post by simcop2387 » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

krob wrote: post #3

HGST look like the best, but they don't have the quantities of the Seagate, makes me wonder if these numbers are skewed :/

They're not going to be skewed. HGST disks are usually more expensive, so that limits the quantity that they buy. The seagate disks are usually cheaper but have a slightly higher (except when it's a brand new line) failure rate. When filling out a single server I go with the HGST disks because the premium price and quality means fewer failures, but it's more cost effective to go for lots of seagate disks when you have more redundancy and can eat more failures.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#7

Post by GNU_IS_UNIX » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

Do larger capacity drives have higher failure rates?

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#8

Post by simcop2387 » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

GNU_IS_UNIX wrote: post #7

Do larger capacity drives have higher failure rates?

It's usually not so much that larger drives are inherently less reliable, but that the larger drives are also the newest lines and so yields and manufacturing issues are more likely to crop up than in the older lines that have had issues sorted out.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#9

Post by SiempreViernes » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

GNU_IS_UNIX wrote: post #7

Do larger capacity drives have higher failure rates?

I don't think so, it's just that they didn't include their older and smaller drives, from previous report I remember a segate (I think) 3 TB disk that was abysmal.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#10

Post by alinde » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #5

alinde wrote: post #2

Would be interesting to also have metrics on failure per TB storage.

I'm not sure how that would be useful, since terabytes don't fail. When a drive fails, it's effectively a brick with no terabytes.

I was thinking as one failure of a 100TB disk has a very different impact of 10 failures of 1TB disks. It'd give some idea on how much data is lost due failures, no?