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Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

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Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#171

Post by mercutio2 »

Aachen wrote: post #147
MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #132

Earlier 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.

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 i…

If this is really a significant concern for you, are you accounting for the CO2e of the (very significant) difference in energy consumption over the lifetime of the device?

It seems unlikely to me that in a full lifecycle accounting the spinning rust would come out ahead.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#172

Post by tanelpoder »

Related - about a year ago or so, I read about a firmware related problem with some vendors SSDs. It was triggered by some uptime counter reaching (overflowing?) some threshold and the SSD just bricked itself. It’s interesting because you could carefully spread out disks from the same batch across many different servers, but if you deployed & started up all these new servers around the same time, the buggy disks in them later all failed around the same time too, when their time was up…

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#173

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

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…

Nearly every storage failure I've dealt with has been because of a failed RAID card (except for thousands of bad quantum bigfoot hard drives at IUPUI).

Moving to software storage systems (ZFS, StorageSpaces, etc.) has saved my butt so many times.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#174

Post by _huayra_ »

ecliptik wrote: post #14

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 end up doing this too, but ensure that the "single data disk" is regularly backed up offsite too (several times a day, zfs send makes it easy). One needs an offsite backup anyway, and as long as your home server data workload isn't too high and you know how to restore (which should be practiced every so often), this can definitely work.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#175

Post by rogerrogerr »

RachelF wrote: post #109
loeg wrote: post #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.)

...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...

Is crypto mining a high storage IO operation? I always thought it was hard on CPU and RAM, but not on disk IO.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#176

Post by wing-_-nuts »

didntcheck wrote: post #53
bombcar wrote: post #47

Earlier 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

I think there's a very strong case to be made for breaking up your computing needs into separate devices that specialize in their respective niche. Last year I followed the 'PCMR' advice and dropped thousands of dollars on a beefy AI/ML/Gaming machine, and it's been great, but I'd be lying to you if I didn't admit that I'd have been better served taking that money and buying a lightweight laptop, a NAS, and gaming console. I'd have enough money left over to rent whatever I needed on runpod for AI/ML stuff.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#177

Post by deelowe »

CTDOCodebases wrote: post #72
ecliptik wrote: post #14

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…

> I am becoming more and more convinced that hard drive reliability is linked to the batch more than to the individual drive models themselves.

Worked in a component test role for many years. It's all of the above. We definitely saw significant differences in AFR across various models, even within the same product line, which were not specific to a batch. Sometimes simply having more or less platters can be enough to skew the failure rate. We didn't do in depth forensics models with higher AFRs as we'd just disqualify them and move on, but I always assumed it probably had something to do with electrical, mechanical (vibration/harmonics) or thermal differences.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#178

Post by deelowe »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #138
meindnoch wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You probably have odds around 5% that the storage drive fails each cycle What do you mean by cycle?

"My most recent drive [...] it should be fine for the next few years until it's time for the cycle to repeat." The amount of time they stay on a single drive.

Drive manufacturers often publish the AFR. From there you can do the math to figure out what sort of redundancy you need. Rule of thumb is that the AFR should be in the 1-2% range. I haven't looked at BB's data, but I'm sure it supports this.

Note, disk failure rates and raid or similar solutions should be used when establishing an availability target, not for protecting against data loss. If data loss is a concern, the approach should be to use back ups.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#179

Post by lotharcable2 »

bigtimesink wrote: post #74

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.

Mirrored raid is good. Other raid levels are of dubious value nowadays.

Ideally you use "software raid" or file system with the capabilities do scrubbing and repair to detect bitrot. Or have some sort of hardware solution that can do the same and notify the OS of the error correction.

And, as always, Raid-type solutions mostly exist to improve availability.

Backups are something else entirely. Nothing beats having lots of copies in different places.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#180

Post by Lammy »

numpad0 wrote: post #170
Lammy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> You don't LEGO assemble rackmount servers.

You may not, but plenty of people do.

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