Blackblaze is one of the most respected services in Storage industry, they've kept gaining my respect even after I launched my own cloud storage solution.
Yev from Backblaze here -> thank you so much!
Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
161–170 of 209 posts
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#162Earlier 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 personally like to get 1 of every animal if I can.
I just get 1/3 Toshiba, 1/3 WD, 1/3 Seagate.
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#163Every 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?
Yev from Backblaze here -> When we started this, we did so with the intent of sharing data and hoping that others would do the same. We see glimmers of that here and there but it's still so fun for us to do and we're expanding on it with Networking Stats and some additional content that's going to be coming soon including how these inform our infrastructure deployment. Fun stuff :)
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#164This is such a fantastic piece of research. Thank you if you are reading. I wish amazon and Microsoft did similar
Yev from Backblaze here -> you're welcome! Glad you like and we also wish they did! That's one of the reasons we started doing it, we wanted to know :D
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
IME heat is a significant factor with spindle drives. People will buy enterprise-class drives, then stick them in enclosures and computer cases that don't flow much air over it, leading to the motor and logic board getting much warmer than they should.
Heat is also a problem for flash. If you care about your data, you have to keep it cool and redundant.
This. My new Samsung T7 SSD overheated and took 4T of kinda priceless family photos with it. Thank you Backblaze for storing those backups for us!
I missed the return window on the SSD so now have a little fan running to keep the thing from overheating again
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#166Earlier 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.
Um, no. Not unless you're still running ancient sub-1TB enterprise drives.
It turns out that modern hard drives have a specified workload limit [1] - this is an artifact of heads being positioned at a low height (For an 18TB Exos X18 drive with a specified workload of 550TB read+write per year, assuming a lifetime of 5 years[2] and that you never actually read back the data you wrote, this would be at max about 150 drive overwrites, or a total of 2.75PB transferred.
In contrast the 15TB Solidigm D5-P5316, a read-optimized enterprise QLC drive, is rated for 10PB of random 64K writes, and 51PB of sequential writes.
[1] https://products.wdc.com/library/other/2579-772003.pdf
[2] the warrantee is 5 years, so I assume "<550TB/yr" means "bad things might happen after 2.75PB". It's quite possible that "bad things" are a lot less bad than what happens after 51PB of writes to the Solidigm drive, but if you exceed the spec by 18x to give you 51PB written, I would assume it would be quite bad.
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Um, no. Not unless you're still running ancient sub-1TB enterprise drives. It turns out that modern hard drives have a specified workload limit [1] - this is an artifact of heads being positioned at a low height ( For an 18TB Exos X18 drive with a specified workload of 550TB read+write per year, assuming a lifetime of 5 years[2] and that you never actually read back the data you wrote, this would be at max about 150…
ps: the white paper is old, I think head heights were 2nm back then. I'm pretty sure <1nm requires helium-filled drives, as the diameter of a nitrogen molecule is about 0.3nm
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 si…
ZFS is like magic.
Every time I think I might need a feature in a file system it seems to have it.
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#169Hard 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.)
...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...
Seagate has always been the "you get what you pay for" && high replacement availability option, at least since the Thai flood and ST3000DM001 days - they kept shipping drives. It was always HGST > Toshiba > Seagate in both price and MTBF, with WD somewhere in between.
Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you google "supermicro 72 drive server" it's definitely a thing that exists, but these use double-length drive trays where each tray contains two drives. Meaning that you need a "whole machine can go down" software architecture of redundancy at a very large scale to make these useful, since pulling one tray to replace a drive will take two drives offline. More realistically the normal version of the same supermicr…
> Meaning that you need a "whole machine can go down" software architecture of redundancy at a very large scale to make these useful Also some serious cooling to avoid the drives in the front cooking the drives in the back (assuming front-to-back airflow).
You don't LEGO assemble rackmount servers. Chassis come with figurative array of jet engines with 12V/0.84A -ish fans that generate characteristic ecstatic harmony. They're designed, supposedly, to take 35C air to keep drives in front at 40C and GPUs at back <95C.