Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

Huh, what happened to HGST?

Every year, this seems like great brand promotion for Backblaze, to technical prospective customers, and a nice service to the field.

What are some other examples from other companies of this, besides open source code?

> I have been authoring the various Drive Stats reports for the past ten years and this will be my last one. I am retiring, or perhaps in Drive Stats vernacular, it would be “migrating.”

Thank you for all these reports over the years.

When I started my current 24-bay NAS more than 10 years ago, I specifically looked at the Backblaze drive stats (which were a new thing at that time) to determine which drives to buy (I chose 4TB 7200rpm HGST drives).

My Louwrentius stats are: zero drive failures over 10+ years.

Meanwhile, the author (Andy Klein) of Backblaze Drive Stats mentions he is retiring, I wish him well and thanks!

PS. The data on my 24-drive NAS would fit on two modern 32TB drives. Crazy.

It's a wash. Modern mechanical HDDs are so reliable that the vendor basically doesn't matter. Especially if you stick with 'Enterprise'-tier drives (preferably with a SAS interface), you should be good.

Aside from some mishaps (that don't necessarily impact reliability) with vendors failing to disclose the HAMR nature of some consumer HDDs, I don't think there have been any truly disastrous series in the past 10-15 years or so.

You're more likely to get bitten by supply-chain substitutions (and get used drives instead of new ones) these days, even though that won't necessarily lead to data loss.