Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2025 • Hacker News Board

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2025

#21

Post by ISL » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

basilgohar wrote: post #2

What Backblaze is doing here is so underrated. This a large scale, practical, in-datacenter real data on essential hardware infrastructure that is available almost nowhere else, and they provide it, and their excellent analysis, completely for free. I miss this culture and I admire leadership that allows it to not only exist, but thrive. I fear the day a stockholder meeting occurs and someone wringing their hands see…

For as long as Backblaze has been doing this and at this level of quality, I have no doubt that these reports are good for business.

(As an anecdotal example -- I first heard about Backblaze from these reports many years ago and have relied on them to an extent in selecting new drives. I'm now a Backblaze customer.)

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2025

#22

Post by theanomaly » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 6:15 PM UTC

tempest_ wrote: post #9

While I find this data interesting it isnt usually very actionable. The skus with the lowest number immediately get bought out(if they are still available, which they are not always) and will never be available. You also always run the risk of "getting a bad batch" or just getting some drives that got beat up in shipping. Usually this data is only useful for keeping an eye on your own stuff and prioritizing replaceme…

While it's tough if you want new drives, I've found I could frequently get used drives on eBay that have significant history on Backblaze's report. Despite the increased risk from used drives, I've found I still end up more reliable than buying random new drives.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2025

#23

Post by emailrob » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 7:26 PM UTC

basilgohar wrote: post #2

What Backblaze is doing here is so underrated. This a large scale, practical, in-datacenter real data on essential hardware infrastructure that is available almost nowhere else, and they provide it, and their excellent analysis, completely for free. I miss this culture and I admire leadership that allows it to not only exist, but thrive. I fear the day a stockholder meeting occurs and someone wringing their hands see…

> by limiting or stopping these reports

Hopefully not, given the performance one was just newly added!

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2025

#24

Post by toast0 » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 9:27 PM UTC

tempest_ wrote: post #9

While I find this data interesting it isnt usually very actionable. The skus with the lowest number immediately get bought out(if they are still available, which they are not always) and will never be available. You also always run the risk of "getting a bad batch" or just getting some drives that got beat up in shipping. Usually this data is only useful for keeping an eye on your own stuff and prioritizing replaceme…

Any sort of long term testing is like this. You can't know what the long term reliability of something is when you buy it. You can estimate from reliability of similar items made in the past, but even if you bought some of everything and kept it on the shelf for X years and then only used the best, the stuff aged on the shelf.

Reports like this might help drive planning for failures. It might also help validate your experience if you've had a bunch of failures with some model and they have too.

IIRC, there have been a couple models that seemed to hit a big bathtub curve style end of life (I think 6TB drives in particularl); that could be a pre-failure indicator for you if you have that model.

Otherwise, yeah, mostly not actionable, but very nice to see the data.

> When buying drives I just look at the sizes I need and the performance then get 1/3rd from each of the manufacturers.

This is a good plan, you should avoid most correlated failures from firmware and manufacturing (although there's a lot of shared supply chain, so you might not avoid all correlated failures if some common component was made improperly during a long enough time period that all three drive makers would be using it in your purchase).