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Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

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Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#141

Post by CTDOCodebases »

dapperdrake wrote: post #118
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My server survived multiple drive failures. ZFS on FreeBSD with mirroring. Simple. Robust. Effective. Zero downtime. Don’t know about disk batches, though. Took used old second hand drives. (Many different batches due to procurement timelines.) Half of them was thrown out because they were clicky. All were tested with S.M.A.R.T. Took about a week. The ones that worked are mostly still around. Only a third of the ones…

I didn't discover ZFS until recently. I played around with it on my HP Microserver around 2010/2011 but ultimately turned away from it because I wasn't confident I could recover the raw files from the drives if everything went belly up.

Whats funny is that about a year ago I ended up installing FreeBSD onto the same Microserver and ran a 5 x 500GB mirror for my most precious data. The drives were ancient but not a single failure.

As someone who never played with hardware raid ZFS blows my mind. The drive that failed was a non issue because the pool it belongs to was a pool with a single vdev (4 disk mirror). Due to the location of the server I had to shut down the system to pull the drive but yeah I think that was 2 weeks later. If this was the old days I would have had to source another drive and copy the data over.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#142

Post by ddmf »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #6

> 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've been very informative, thanks.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#143

Post by esskay »

sys32768 wrote: post #61
emmelaich wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What models? There's a big difference between the cheapest and the more pro models. That said, my four 2Tb Barracudas still going fine after many years (10+). One failed, replaced with a green. Big mistake, that failed quickly and I went back to standard Barracudas. They don't get used intensely though.

8TB Ironwolf NAS ST8000VN004

I've had terrible luck with those drives, out of 12, 10 failed within a couple of years. Not a same batch issue as they were purchased over the period of about 6-8 months and not even from the same place.

Yet I've got Toshibas that run hot and are loud as heck that seem to keep going forever.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#144

Post by michaelt »

loeg wrote: post #113
RachelF wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and many used Seagate drives have been resold as new in the last 3 years. They were used for crypto mining and then had their SMART parameters wiped back to "new" 0 hours usage. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Hard-disk-fraud-Increasing-evid...

Sure, but it's hard to blame that on Seagate. The AFR is their fault.

It's not Seagate's fault, but it would behove them to clamp down on such activity by authorised resellers.

After all, it's not just the buyer getting ripped off; it's also Seagate. A customer paid for a brand new Seagate drive and Seagate didn't see a penny of it.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#145

Post by zipy124 »

echoangle wrote: post #79
userbinator wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I believe google surpass this metric, specifically because of things like android phone back-ups, google photos, drive, youtube etc....

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#146

Post by Aachen »

tharkun__ wrote: post #107
bragr wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 had to re-learn this as well. Nobody told me. Ordered two drives, worked great in tandem until their simultaneous demise. Same symptoms at the same time

I rescued what could be rescued at a few KB/s read speed and then checked the serial numbers...

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#147

Post by Aachen »

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #132
loeg wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to TLC flash last time around and no regrets. With QLC the situations where HDDs are cheaper, including the cost of power, are growing narrower and narrower.

It really depends on your usage patterns. Write-heavy workloads are still better cases for spinning rust due to how much harder they are on flash, especially at greater layer depths.

Plus that SSDs apparently have a very dirty manufacturing process, worse than the battery or screen in your laptop. I recently learned this because the EU is starting to require reporting CO2e for products (mentioned on a Dutch podcast: https://tweakers.net/geek/230852/tweakers-podcast-356-switch...). I don't know how a hard drive stacks up but if the SSD is the worst of all of a laptop's components, odds are that it's better and so one could make the decision to use one or the other based on whether an SSD is needed rather than just tossing it in because it's cheap

Probably it also matters if you get a bulky 3.5" HDD when all you need is a small flash chip with a few GB of persistent storage — the devil is in the details but I simply didn't realise this could be a part of the decision process

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