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Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023

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Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023

#31

Post by pcurve »

kstrauser wrote: post #29
1-6 wrote: post #18

My simple rule still stands even after 20 years: Avoid Seagate.

Conversely, I’ve had nothing but bad luck with WD the last few years, and my Seagates have been flawless. My simple rule is that all drives suck, and always have good backups.

Yup. All drives kick the bucket at some point. That's why I use BB. I don't trust myself with NAS.

The ones that never failed me were any drives made by Quantum using SCSI interface. 5 drives, zero failure over 10+ years. But those were slower and cooler running units.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023

#32

Post by andy4blaze »

kqr wrote: post #13
hiatus wrote: post #2

Surprised by the number of drives with 0 failures, though it seems not all of the drives were run for the required time to qualify for the rating. > In Q3, six different drive models managed to have zero drive failures during the quarter. But only the 6TB Seagate, noted above, had over 50,000 drive days, our minimum standard for ensuring we have enough data to make the AFR plausible.

I have always wondered why they don't use techniques from survival analysis to be able to draw conclusions even from sets with lower failure rates. Or for that matter to avoid slight bias even for drives they do report.

Andy Klein from Backblaze here. We have done some survival analysis (kaplan-meier curves). In our case, we need to have a reasonable number of failures over the observation period to get decent results. You can take a look at some of our work here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-life-expectancy/ and see if that is what you were expecting.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023

#33

Post by kstrauser »

pcurve wrote: post #31
kstrauser wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, I’ve had nothing but bad luck with WD the last few years, and my Seagates have been flawless. My simple rule is that all drives suck, and always have good backups.

Yup. All drives kick the bucket at some point. That's why I use BB. I don't trust myself with NAS. The ones that never failed me were any drives made by Quantum using SCSI interface. 5 drives, zero failure over 10+ years. But those were slower and cooler running units.

I’ve got a NAS backed up to Backblaze. It’s a nice setup. I can quickly recover from local data loss, or replace a RAID disk when needed, but if the NAS gets hit by a bus then I still haven’t lost everything.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023

#35

Post by AnonC »

1-6 wrote: post #18

My simple rule still stands even after 20 years: Avoid Seagate.

My simple rule in the same period: avoid WD at all costs, prefer HGST (which later became part of WD) and use Seagate mostly. I’ve seen variations of these personal rules, and during a time when Backblaze didn’t exist yet (and came up with better measurements on a larger scale), it was like one of those holy wars between tabs and spaces (or vi and emacs).

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023

#37

Post by toast0 »

thebiss wrote: post #28
dehrmann wrote: post #15

> The average age of the retired drives was just over eight years Didn't realize they can last so long.

Under my desk right now is a too-underutilized-to-upgrade-NAS that has been spinning 1TB Western Digitals since 2010. Between RAID-Z2 and cloud backups, there's almost no reason to get rid of them except for performance, which doesn't matter here.

If all of your disks are about the same age, from the same vendor, it might be reasonable to replace them over time to mitigate the risk that a firmware or manufacturing issue results in them all failing around the same time. Many vendors have had firmware errors where counters rolled over and the drive becomes inaccessible (generally much sooner than 13 years though).

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023

#38

Post by ksec »

AnonC wrote: post #36
ksec wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite as long as 20 years, but for the past 15 years: Just buy HGST.

HGST was bought by WD long ago. Has that had any impact on the types of drives sold or the quality?

>has that had any impact on the types of drives sold or the quality?

No. To the point when WD tries to rebrand those drives away from HGST, the market demanded HGST and they brought it back a year later.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023

#39

Post by Netcob »

kstrauser wrote: post #29
1-6 wrote: post #18

My simple rule still stands even after 20 years: Avoid Seagate.

Conversely, I’ve had nothing but bad luck with WD the last few years, and my Seagates have been flawless. My simple rule is that all drives suck, and always have good backups.

My WD drives failed pretty consistently, so I'm now giving Seagate a try.

Well, my main reason was that WD decided that just failing "naturally" after a few years wasn't enough, but that a drive having been on for 3 years should be considered the same as "failing" (communicated through WDDA), which led to Synology adopting that for a while. Not sure what the current state is of that, but I intend to swap drives when they fail, not when they turn 3.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023

#40

Post by Dalewyn »

1-6 wrote: post #18

My simple rule still stands even after 20 years: Avoid Seagate.

I used to swear by WD HDDs, but when I literally couldn't tell which of their NAS drives were CMR and SMR a few years ago I wrote them off and went to Seagate who clearly labeled their drives.

Combine that with their lackluster reputation in solid state as of late and I probably won't buy their HDDs until Seagate one day gives me the "WTF are you even selling?" rigmarole too.

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