This is such a fantastic piece of research. Thank you if you are reading. I wish amazon and Microsoft did similar
Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
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Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#72It'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…
Take these stats with a grain of salt.
I am becoming more and more convinced that hard drive reliability is linked to the batch more than to the individual drive models themselves. Often you will read online of people experiencing multiple failures from drives purchased from the same batch.
I cannot prove this because I have no idea about Blackblazes procurement patterns but I bought one of the better drives in this list (ST16000NM001G) and it failed within a year.
When it comes to hard drives or storage more generally a better approach is protect yourself against down time with software raid and backups and pray that if a drive does fail it does so within the warranty period.
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#73True enterprise drives ftw - even Seagate usually makes some very reliable ones. They also tend to be a little faster. Some people have complained about noise but I have never noticed.
They are noticeable much heavier in hand (and supposedly most use dual bearings).
Combined with selecting based on Backblazes statistics I have had no HDD failures in years
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#74I used to think these were interesting and used them to inform my next HDD purchase. I realized I only used them to pick a recently reliable brand, we're down to three, and the stats are mostly old models, so the main use is if you're buying a used drive from the same batch that Backblaze happens to have also used.
Buy two from different vendors and RAID or do regular off-site backups.
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#75Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#76True enterprise drives ftw - even Seagate usually makes some very reliable ones. They also tend to be a little faster. Some people have complained about noise but I have never noticed. They are noticeable much heavier in hand (and supposedly most use dual bearings). Combined with selecting based on Backblazes statistics I have had no HDD failures in years
One of these blogs literally told us that enterprise drives were no better.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/enterprise-drive-reliability/
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exabytes. 4.4 exabytes.
An amazing amount if you consider that 16EB is the amount of data a 64-bit quantity can address, and this is over a quarter of that.
There was a dashboard where the total storage at Google was tracked and they had to update it from 64 bits for this reason... about a decade or more ago.
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fact for home users backup is WAY more important than RAID, because your NAS down for a (restore time) is not that important, but data loss is forever.
For essential personal data you're right, but a very common use case for a home NAS is a media server. The library is usually non-essential data - annoying to lose, but not critical. Combined with its large size, it's usually hard to justify a full offsite backup. RAID offers a cost-effective way to give it some protection, when the alternative is nothing
Having to restore my media server without a backup would cost me around a dozen hours of my time. 2 bucks a month to back up to Glacier with rclone’s crypt backend is easily worth it.
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exabytes. 4.4 exabytes.
An amazing amount if you consider that 16EB is the amount of data a 64-bit quantity can address, and this is over a quarter of that.
Wow, that’s a cool stat. I wonder if people will ever seriously use 16EB of memory in a single system and will need to change to a more-than-64-bit architecture or if 64 bit is truly enough. This has „640k ought to be enough for anybody“ potential (and I know he didn’t say that).
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good lord it even supports BorgBackup. Thank you very much!
Be aware that it's just a single server. It's not replicated across multiple hosts like in the case of google drive. So you definitely want a backup of that if it's your primary copy.
Good point, thank you.
It may actually be a good thing that it's not replicated. That forces me to really make sure I have a separate backup elsewhere.