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Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

backblaze.com

31–40 of 209 posts

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#32

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…

No RAID 0 for the bulk storage? What’s your disaster plan?

restic + rclone to cloud storage for data I care about, the majority of the data can easily be replaced if needed.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#33
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?

A company called TechEmpower used to run periodic web framework benchmarks and share out the results using nice dashboard. Not sure why they stopped doing these.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s...

Edit: Adding a shoutout to the iFixIt teardowns that are also quite informative content:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown

Edit 2: Also Lumafield CT scans:

https://www.scanofthemonth.com/

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#34
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?

Jepsen (of database benchmark fame) does paid consulting work.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#35

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…

I'm sure you're aware but consider putting another drive in for some flavor of RAID, it's a lot easier to rebuild a RAID than to rebuild data usually! Edit: By "some flavor" I mean hardware or software.

RAID doesn't cover all of the scenarios as offsite backup, such as massive electrical power surge, fire, flood, theft or other things causing total destruction of the RAID array. Ideally you'd want a setup that has local storage redundancy in some form of RAID and offsite backup.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#36

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…

>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.

I also have multiple drives in operation in the past decade and didn't experience any failures. However unlike you, I didn't use backblaze's drive stats to inform my purchase. I just bought whatever was cheapest, knowing that any TCO reduction from higher reliability (at best, around 10%) would eaten up by the lack of discounts the "best" drive. That's the problem with n=1 anecdotes. You don't know whether nothing bad happened because you followed "the right advice", or you just got lucky.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#38
post #2

Huh, what happened to HGST?

They, ironically, got acquired by Western Digital. But the 'Ultrastar' line name is still alive, if that's what you're looking for. 'Deskstar' seems to be gone, though.

> 'Deskstar' seems to be gone, though.

Considering we used to call them deathstars, I'm surprised they didn't get rid of the line sooner...

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#39
Hard to argue with those WDC/Toshiba numbers. Seagate's are just embarrassing in contrast.

(HGST drives -- now WDC -- were great, but those are legacy drives. It's been part of WD for some time. The new models are WDC branded.)

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#40
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?

Some examples from me:

Database benchmarks: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench (containing 30+ databases) and the new JSON analytics benchmark, https://github.com/ClickHouse/JSONBench/

Plus, the hardware benchmark: https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/hardware/ (also used by Phoronix).

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