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Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

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Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#51
post #24

I realize my comment is a tangent. I'm hoping folks might be understanding and hopefully have some advice. If you have terabytes to back up, are there still any backup services left that'll let you ship them a drive for a faster initial backup?

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased. :-) > If you have terabytes to back up, are there still any backup services left that'll let you ship them a drive for a faster initial backup? Backblaze offers a "Backblaze Rapid Ingest Fireball" to allow you to ship us 60 TBytes of data on an appliance. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/introducing-backblazes-rapid-... If you only have 2 - 10 TBytes, I suggest you get a f…

It's been over a year, can you please ask someone at backblaze to add a single line of code into the snapshots so you can leave a comment? Right now if you make a snapshot, the only info is the date and time. Not the data, what's in the snapshot, literally anything about it. Please!

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#52
I wonder if any of those companies talk to Backblaze about it. Like sending drives back for inspection :)

I'm also curious why those companies wouldn't directly talk to backblaze. I read somewhere a blog post on how they bought specific drives online at a sale.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#53
post #24

I realize my comment is a tangent. I'm hoping folks might be understanding and hopefully have some advice. If you have terabytes to back up, are there still any backup services left that'll let you ship them a drive for a faster initial backup?

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased. :-) > If you have terabytes to back up, are there still any backup services left that'll let you ship them a drive for a faster initial backup? Backblaze offers a "Backblaze Rapid Ingest Fireball" to allow you to ship us 60 TBytes of data on an appliance. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/introducing-backblazes-rapid-... If you only have 2 - 10 TBytes, I suggest you get a f…

but don't most ISPs have datacaps nowadays, Comcast has 1TB

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#54
Tangentially related. Whenever I get a new drive, I always do a "burn-in". A program writes data to the whole drive and then reads it back (reproducible random data).

Is there any real justification for doing this kind of test on a new drive?

Doing it takes quite awhile, so I've been wondering lately if it's even worth it. I've never found anything with it.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#55

Anything interesting in this one? I've stopped reading them because they all seem to be "Seagates fail kind of a lot but we use them because reasons. HGST doesn't fail a lot, but we also have statistically insignificant numbers of them, so ."

"because reasons" is an overly negative way to say "because they offer the best value" They can get large numbers of them cheap, and their system is good at detecting and replacing bad drives, so why not use them?

In my head it wasn't negative, it was that there are a lot of reasons that I don't think needed to be gone into. Offering value is one, having systems that are designed to minimize the impact of failures is another. Others that came to mind when I wrote that include: Being able to get them at the quantities they need, having systems that reduce the COST of failures (drive replacement and RMA), cost of RMAing 10 drives is Maybe it's just my social/business groups, but "because reasons" doesn't have to have a negative meaning. I use it as more a statement of fact: There are reasons for this.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#56
Curious if anyone knows how they calculate drive days. For example the first drive on their report (hgst 4tb) has a count of 50 but total days of 23069. If I take the 50 by the days it should be 18250, so not sure where the extra 4k in days is coming from. Retired drives or something?

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#57

Tangentially related. Whenever I get a new drive, I always do a "burn-in". A program writes data to the whole drive and then reads it back (reproducible random data). Is there any real justification for doing this kind of test on a new drive? Doing it takes quite awhile, so I've been wondering lately if it's even worth it. I've never found anything with it.

If you've never found anything with it, why do you keep doing it (see: the definition of insanity)?

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#58

Tangentially related. Whenever I get a new drive, I always do a "burn-in". A program writes data to the whole drive and then reads it back (reproducible random data). Is there any real justification for doing this kind of test on a new drive? Doing it takes quite awhile, so I've been wondering lately if it's even worth it. I've never found anything with it.

If you've never found anything with it, why do you keep doing it (see: the definition of insanity)?

I have. Last time I bought a bunch of drives for a RAID array, I used the WD utility to test each of them. 1 of the 6 failed the test.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#59
post #24

I realize my comment is a tangent. I'm hoping folks might be understanding and hopefully have some advice. If you have terabytes to back up, are there still any backup services left that'll let you ship them a drive for a faster initial backup?

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased. :-) > If you have terabytes to back up, are there still any backup services left that'll let you ship them a drive for a faster initial backup? Backblaze offers a "Backblaze Rapid Ingest Fireball" to allow you to ship us 60 TBytes of data on an appliance. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/introducing-backblazes-rapid-... If you only have 2 - 10 TBytes, I suggest you get a f…

I have cable Internet with 20mbit/s upload which I believe is decent (unless you have fiber) means uploading 8 000 000 gigabits (=1 terabyte) would take 400 000 seconds, that's about five days and that's the theoretical maximum. At ten terabytes you are now looking at two months...

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#60
post #47

I really appreciate BackBlaze opening up this data. While I don't purchase HDDs often, I always refer to these reports when deciding. They also open sourced their server chassis which is awesome! It's nice to see a reduction of the failure rates as a whole. It looks like the next few years will be some interesting times for the growth in storage capacities for HDDs.

Yev from Backblaze here -> Glad you're enjoying the stats!

Please thank those responsible on my behalf (and all of the others who study the numbers before purchasing drives.)
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