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Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

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Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#141

Post by jrace »

brianwski wrote: post #50
jl6 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be wary of freeloading the upload bandwidth on a pipe that belongs to someone else.

I wouldn't advocate for breaking any laws or stealing anything that doesn't belong to you, but a whole lot of places have "totally unused bandwidth" and it won't hurt them at all financially for you to use 1/4 of their unused capacity. Funny story: I'm kind of unusual that I run an open WiFi hotspot in my home, because I have plenty of unused bandwidth and guests in my house and even neighbors are welcome to borrow s…

That is why you must secure your network. Depending on where you live you could be criminally responsible. What if one of your neighbors is sharing child-pornography?

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#142

Post by kalleboo »

linsomniac wrote: post #20
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 :/

My experience, over decades, but now coming up on half that ago, was that IBM/Hitachi/HGST are definitely worth it. I used to run a small hosting business, which had hundreds of discs, and consulting business which had clients with hundreds more discs. Seagates, in general, could always be expected to fail in a 3 year span. Often multiple times. IBM/Hitachi/HGST, especially the UltraStar enterprise line, would basica…

The Deathstar 75GXP issues were [quote Wikipedia] "due to the magnetic coating soon beginning to loosen and sprinkle off from the platters, creating dust in the hard disk array and leading to crashes over large areas of the platters".

Perhaps heat could have accelerated the process by loosening the material somehow, but it was definitely a design/manufacturing flaw.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#144

Post by Arn_Thor »

sangnoir wrote: post #62
jacobolus wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a 2%/year failure rate per drive, then that leaves you with a nearly 12%/year chance that at least 1 of 6 drives will fail each year. Or a 31% chance that at least 1 of 6 drives will fail within 3 years. Or a 52% chance that at least 1 of 6 drives will fail within 6 years.

The question then is, would it be cheaper to replace that one drive or get the more expensive disks with lower chances of failing?

Isn't there a cost to time and convenience too? Buying a new disk takes time, as does rebuilding the RAID. And during that time you are vulnerable to another drive failure which could be disastrous if you only have one drive redundancy, especially during the very intensive rebuilding process.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#145

Post by Arn_Thor »

brianwski wrote: post #32
akulbe wrote: 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…

Thanks for weighing in. I wish it was that fast. I'm a new customer (formerly CrashPlan) uploading about 7TB, mostly photos and videos. Got a 500Mbps up/down line (in theory and in practice), but my daily uploading to Backblaze has never surpassed 30Mbps I've tried both low, medium and max thread numbers.

In such a case, could the HDD itself be a bottleneck as it's trying to slice and dice a lot of files large and small? It's running at 70-80% active time.

Probably doesn't help that I'm located abroad either..

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#146

Post by boulos »

brianwski wrote: post #129
zepearl wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! To summarize I understand: A) the local working copy (locally replicated in your case), B) the local backup and C) the cloud/very remote backup. B & C cover each other if any datacenter is completely wiped out.

Correct. > if any datacenter is completely wiped out Correct. When all of our datacenters were in Sacramento, California, some customers told us they were concerned because they were ALSO in Sacramento and a meteor could wipe out both their computer, the local backup, and Backblaze's cloud backup, all in one meteor strike. While by default we put your data where it is convenient for Backblaze, we CAN work with custom…

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Thanks for mentioning this! I’ve always (begrudgingly) had to tell people that while I love Backblaze you have to understand the geographic risk. I always suspected you had a “yeah, we can put you here if we edit this config file” but the drop down will be much better for everyone. Looking forward to it!

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#147

Post by ridgeguy »

icelancer wrote: post #92
conbandit wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why do you back up drives if you've never had a failure?

For the same reason you buy fire insurance even though your home has never burned down.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#148

Post by lathiat »

saltcured wrote: post #133
HillaryBriss wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> improper cooling You've had far more experience with this stuff than I have. I wonder what your view is on all these NAS RAID boxes and HDD longevity and heat. I personally never saw so many HDD failures until I started running them inside a small NAS I bought some years ago. I nicknamed it my "drive killer" because I was replacing the things so often. Other HDDs I have in other (non-NAS) machines sure seemed to la…

It's not impossible to have a drive appear unreliable in one machine and reliable in another (if you physically move it). There could be something electrically or mechanically wrong with the machine which causes a particular drive to malfunction more frequently. If you see this repeatedly with one machine, I would definitely consider that it is the machine which is bad rather than the drives. A power supply may be in…

Vibrations can be problematic in multi drive chassis. The more NAS rated drives are apparently rated specifically to deal better with vibrations and of course the NAS itself some isolate drives far better than others from each other.

It might seem minor, but just watch this rather old now but infamous video of Brendan Gregg shouting at HDDs causing significant drops in throughput: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#149

Post by sigi45 »

hinkley wrote: post #94
atYevP wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> > I read somewhere a blog post on how they bought specific drives online at a sale. Yea, we used to buy drives wherever we could, but that was years ago. We're larger now so we go through more established channels.

Also no natural disasters taking out the manufacturers again, right?

What a bad time :|. When i remember correctly, it took over a year to get prices after the disaster.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#150

Post by HillaryBriss »

lathiat wrote: post #148
saltcured wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not impossible to have a drive appear unreliable in one machine and reliable in another (if you physically move it). There could be something electrically or mechanically wrong with the machine which causes a particular drive to malfunction more frequently. If you see this repeatedly with one machine, I would definitely consider that it is the machine which is bad rather than the drives. A power supply may be in…

Vibrations can be problematic in multi drive chassis. The more NAS rated drives are apparently rated specifically to deal better with vibrations and of course the NAS itself some isolate drives far better than others from each other. It might seem minor, but just watch this rather old now but infamous video of Brendan Gregg shouting at HDDs causing significant drops in throughput: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDac…

fun video! it doesn't take much vibration. (or he's just an incredibly loud screamer.)
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