121–130 of 209 posts
I 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.
RAID is not a backup! Do both.
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>Often you will read online of people experiencing multiple failures from drives purchased from the same batch I'll toss in on that anecdata. This has happened to me a several times. In all these cases we were dealing with drives with more or less sequential serial numbers. In two instances they were just cache drives for our CDN nodes. Not a big deal, but I sure kept the remote hands busy those weeks trying to keep…
This has been the "conventional wisdom" for a very long time. Is this one of those things that get "lost with time" and every generation has to rediscover it? Like, 25+ years ago I would've bought hard drives for just my personal usage in a software raid making sure I don't get consecutive serial numbers, but ones that are very different. I'd go to my local hardware shop and ask them specifically for that. They'd sho…
I mostly just buy multiple brands from multiple vendors. And size the partitions for mdadm a bit smaller.
But even the same model where it's 2 each from bestbuy, Amazon, newegg, microcenter, seems to get me a nice assortment of variety.
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>Often you will read online of people experiencing multiple failures from drives purchased from the same batch I'll toss in on that anecdata. This has happened to me a several times. In all these cases we were dealing with drives with more or less sequential serial numbers. In two instances they were just cache drives for our CDN nodes. Not a big deal, but I sure kept the remote hands busy those weeks trying to keep…
This has been the "conventional wisdom" for a very long time. Is this one of those things that get "lost with time" and every generation has to rediscover it? Like, 25+ years ago I would've bought hard drives for just my personal usage in a software raid making sure I don't get consecutive serial numbers, but ones that are very different. I'd go to my local hardware shop and ask them specifically for that. They'd sho…
Of course, learned experience has value in the long term for a reason.
> 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.
Thanks for a decade of amazing statistics and lessons. Enjoy resilvering into retirement!
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…
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…
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Nowadays you can get a petabyte in a single machine (50 drives 20TB each).
Out of curiosity, what server cases can actually accommodate 50 drives?
Not a server per se, but you just take one 1U server and daisy chain a lot of those JBOD chassis for the needed capacity. You can have 1080 disks in a 42" rack.
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…
And in your particular situation, 3 refurbished WUH721414ALE6L4 are the same total price. If you put those in RAIDZ1 then that's 28TB with about as much reliability as you can hope to have in a single device. (With backups still being important but that's a separate topic.)
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
hopefully you have 2x of these drives in some kind of raid mirror such that if one fails, you can simply replace it and re-mirror. not having something like this is risky.
Wasn’t the issue with large drives that remaining drive has a high chance of failure during re-silvering?
With ZFS on Debian the default is to scrub monthly (second Sunday) and resilvering is not more stressful than that. The entire drive contents (not allocated space) has to be read to re-silver.
Also define "high chance." Is 10% high? 60%? I've replaced failed drives or just ones I wanted to swap to a larger size at least a dozen times and never had a concurrent failure.
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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).
> need to change to a more-than-64-bit architecture Perhaps we don't need a single flat address space with byte-addressable granularity at those sizes? I wonder how an 8 bit byte, 48 bit word system would have fared. 2*32 is easy to exhaust in routine tasks; 2*48 not so much.