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Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

backblaze.com

11–20 of 209 posts

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#11
post #4

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?

Benson Leung's USB cable crusade comes to mind. Also Jim Gettys' coming out of seeming retirement to educate us all about Bufferbloat.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#12
post #9

I had five Seagates fail in my Synology NAS in less than a year. Somebody suggested it was a "bad" firmware on that model, but I switched to WD and haven't had a single failure since.

Exos Series?

I never had problems with Seagate Exos or WD Red or even the WD shucked White Reds.

It’s interesting how different the experiences are, some swear by a specific brand.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#13
I wish there was a way to underspin (RPM) some of these drives to lower noise for non-datacenter use - the quest for the Largest "Quiet" drive - is a hard one. It would be cool if these could downshift into <5000RPM mode and run much quieter.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#14
It's not a best practice, but the last 10 years I've run my home server with a smaller faster drive for the OS and a single larger disk for bulk storage that I choose using Backblaze Drive Stats. None of have failed yet (fingers-crossed). I really trust their methodology and it's an extremely valuable resource for me as a consumer.

My most recent drive is a WDC WUH722222ALE6L4 22TiB, and looking at the stats (albeit only a few months of data), and overall trend of WDC, in this report gives me peace of mind that it should be fine for the next few years until it's time for the cycle to repeat.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#15
My home NAS drives are currently hitting the 5 years mark. So far I'm at no failures, but I'm considering if it's time to upgrade/replace. What I have is 5 x 4TB pre-SMR WD Reds (which are now called the WD Red Pro line I guess). Capacity wise I've got them setup in a RAID 6, which gives me 12TB of usable capacity, of which I currently use about 7.5TB.

I'm basically mulling between going as-is to SSDs in a similar 5x4TB configuration, or just going for 20TB hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration and a pair of 4TB SATA SSDs in a RAID 1 for use cases that need better-than-HDD performance.

These figures indicate Seagate is improving in reliability, which might be worth considering this time given WD's actions in the time since my last purchase, but on the other hand I'd basically sworn off Seagate after a wave of drives in the mid-2010s with a near 100% failure rate within 5 years.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#16

> 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.

They really have been great, the bar was set high!

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#17
post #9

I had five Seagates fail in my Synology NAS in less than a year. Somebody suggested it was a "bad" firmware on that model, but I switched to WD and haven't had a single failure since.

Unfortunately using all the same type of drive in any kinda of system is a recipe for disaster.

Incompatibilities between the drive firmware and the device they're in can cause problems.

Subtle harmonic issues with how the drives are mounted, which might be fine for some drives and disastrous for others.

I've always found the best strategy with mechanical hard drives is to have various brands and models in the same device on RAID.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#18
post #9

I had five Seagates fail in my Synology NAS in less than a year. Somebody suggested it was a "bad" firmware on that model, but I switched to WD and haven't had a single failure since.

Did you purchase them all at the same time from the same store? I've had a batch of SSDs fail from the same vendor / mfg timeframe. I started ordering a couple here and there form different vendors where possible. So far i've been lucky to get drives that aren't from the same batches. I tend to buy Exos from seagate and WD gold though so there's a bit of a premium tacked on.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#19
post #4

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?

This is called "content marketing" and there are usually at least a handful of them on the HN front page at any given time.

Although I will say that the BackBlaze drive stats articles are a much higher effort and standard of quality than you typically see for this tactic.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#20
post #4

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?

Puget Systems has similar publications covering their experience building client systems, though not always in the same level of detail. They also have PugetBench to benchmark systems in real-world applications/workflows.
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