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Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

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Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#191
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The figure already includes the lifetime energy consumption and it's comparatively insignificant. The calculation even includes expected disposal and recycling!

It sounded really comprehensive besides having to make assumptions about standard usage patterns, but then the usage is like 10% of the lifetime emissions so it makes a comparatively small difference if I'm a heavy gamer or leave it to sit and collect dust: 90% remains the same

> If this is really a significant concern for you

It literally affects everyone I'm afraid and simply not knowing about it (until now) doesn't stop warming either. Yes, this concerns everyone, although not everyone has the means to do something about it (like to buy the cleaner product)

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Until Intel's Ice Lake server processors introduced in 2019, x86-64 essentially was a 48-bit address architecture: addresses are stored in 64-bit registers, but were only valid if the top two bytes were sign-extended from the last bit of the 48-bit address. Now they support 57 bit addressing.

True. However what I had in mind there was something along the lines of 48-bit integer and fp arithmetic as the "native" size with 96-bit as the much more limited extended form that 128-bit currently fulfills for x86. For the address space regular 48-bit pointers would address the needs of typical applications.

Extended 96-bit pointers could address the (rather exotic) needs of things such as distributed HPC workloads, flat byte addressable petabyte and larger filesystems, etc. Explicitly segmented memory would also (I assume) be nice for things like peripheral DMA, NUMA nodes, and HPC clusters. Interpreters would certainly welcome space for additional pointer tag bits in a fast, natively supported format.

Given the existence of things like RIP-relative addressing and the insane complexity of current MMUs such a scheme seems on its face quite reasonable to me. I don't understand (presumably my own lack of knowledge) why 64-bit was selected. As you point out addresses themselves were 48-bit in practice until quite recently.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

You picked a weird place to reply, because that comment is just saying what "cycle" means. But yes, I've done the math. I'm just going with the BB numbers here, and after a few years it adds up. The way I understand "peace of mind", you can't have it with a single drive. Nice and simple.

I assume by "cycle" they are referring to mtbf/afr

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Perhaps we don't need a single flat address space with byte-addressable granularity at those sizes?

History is filled with paging schemes in computers (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension). Usually people do this initially as it allows one to access more space without requiring a change of all software, it is an extension to an existing software paradigm, but once the CPU can just address it all as a single linear space, it simplifies architectures and is preferred.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You picked a weird place to reply, because that comment is just saying what "cycle" means. But yes, I've done the math. I'm just going with the BB numbers here, and after a few years it adds up. The way I understand "peace of mind", you can't have it with a single drive. Nice and simple.

I assume by "cycle" they are referring to mtbf/afr

I am reasonably confident that "time for the cycle to repeat" is the cycle of purchasing a new drive and moving to it.

Whether that's right or wrong, when I talked about 5% failure chance per cycle that's what I meant. And 5% is probably an underestimate.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you hitting that pricing? S3 "Glacier Deep Archive"? Standard S3 is $23/TB/mo. Backblaze B2 is $6/TB/mo. S3 Glacier Instant or Flexible Retrieval is about $4/TB/mo. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is about $1/TB/mo. I take it you have ~2TB in deep archive? I have 5TB in Backblaze and I've been meaning to prune it way down. Edit: these are raw storage costs and I neglected transfer. Very curious as my sibling comment…

Yup, deep archive on <2TB, which is more content than most people watch in a lifetime. I mostly store content in 1080p as my vision is not good enough to notice the improvement at 4K.

> more content than most people watch in a lifetime

The average person watches more than 3 hours of TV/video per day, and 1 gigabyte per hour is on the low end of 1080p quality. Multiply those together and you'd need 1TB per year. 5TB per year of higher quality 1080p wouldn't be an outlier.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#197

I've owned 17 Seagate ST12000NM001G (12TB SATA) drives over the last 24mos in a big raidz3 pool. My personal stats, grouping by the first 3-4 SN characters: - 5/8 ZLW2s failed - 1/4 ZL2s - 1/2 ZS80 - 0/2 ZTN - 0/1 ZLW0 All drives were refurbs. Two from the Seagate eBay store, all others from ServerPartDeals. 7/15 of the drives I purchases from ServerPartDeals have failed, at least four of those failures have been wit…

Yeah, I don't think that Backblaze are buying refurbs...

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#199

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...

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

There are coins like Chia that were built around "wasting disk space" proof-of-work rather than the "wasting {C/GPU|ASIC} cycles" PoW that Bitcoin uses (and Ethereum used to use.)

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, deep archive on <2TB, which is more content than most people watch in a lifetime. I mostly store content in 1080p as my vision is not good enough to notice the improvement at 4K.

> more content than most people watch in a lifetime The average person watches more than 3 hours of TV/video per day, and 1 gigabyte per hour is on the low end of 1080p quality. Multiply those together and you'd need 1TB per year. 5TB per year of higher quality 1080p wouldn't be an outlier.

Holy crap! I watch like, maybe a couple of movies a month and two or three miniseries a year?

Is that including ads too? And sports/news?

EDIT: Wait, are these "average person" or "average American?"

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