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Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

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Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#41

Post by walrus01 »

loeg wrote: post #37
walrus01 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to guess, the seagates are sufficiently cheap in ridiculous quantities, and Backblaze's multi-pod redundancy/parity and drive monitoring is good enough, that even if they have a 3% failure rate and the HGSTs have a 0.75% failure rate, that it's still an acceptable risk for them. If you're an individual person with a 12-drive ZFS RAIDZ2 with hotspare, in a file server in your garage or something, you might pr…

Especially if you're an individual person with a non-raid6 / hot spare system, you might pay a premium for a lower failure rate (standalone drive, RAID1, or RAID5, for example).

Although in the year 2019 it would be pretty reckless to use RAID5 without hotspare. Or even RAID5 with hotspare. This has been true for a long, long time:

https://www.google.com/search?&q=why+raid5+stops+working&ie=...

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#42

Post by jl6 »

brianwski wrote: post #32
akulbe wrote: post #24

I realize my comment is a tangent. I'm hoping folks might be understanding and hopefully have some advice. If you have terabytes to back up, are there still any backup services left that'll let you ship them a drive for a faster initial backup?

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased. :-) > If you have terabytes to back up, are there still any backup services left that'll let you ship them a drive for a faster initial backup? Backblaze offers a "Backblaze Rapid Ingest Fireball" to allow you to ship us 60 TBytes of data on an appliance. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/introducing-backblazes-rapid-... If you only have 2 - 10 TBytes, I suggest you get a f…

Be wary of freeloading the upload bandwidth on a pipe that belongs to someone else.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#43

Post by VectorLock »

simcop2387 wrote: post #6
krob wrote: post #3

HGST look like the best, but they don't have the quantities of the Seagate, makes me wonder if these numbers are skewed :/

They're not going to be skewed. HGST disks are usually more expensive, so that limits the quantity that they buy. The seagate disks are usually cheaper but have a slightly higher (except when it's a brand new line) failure rate. When filling out a single server I go with the HGST disks because the premium price and quality means fewer failures, but it's more cost effective to go for lots of seagate disks when you hav…

This makes me curious of where the cost/benefit point is between these brands of drives. Do they buy enough that the reduced cost for higher failure rate outweighs the expense of buying more expensive drives?

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#44

Post by brianwski »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #5
alinde wrote: post #2

Would be interesting to also have metrics on failure per TB storage.

I'm not sure how that would be useful, since terabytes don't fail. When a drive fails, it's effectively a brick with no terabytes.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> When a drive fails, it's effectively a brick with no terabytes.

Interesting factoid: that isn't always true. What you describe is actually the CLEANEST type of failure, the drive suddenly becomes a brick. We replace the drive and rebuild it from parity.

A way more interesting failure is when disk blocks start going bad at an unacceptable rate. Backblaze splits your data across 20 different hard drives in 20 different machines in our datacenter. The sub-parts we call "shards", a shard sits on one disk. Each shard has a SHA-1 checksum, so we know if each shard has been corrupted. If an individual shard is missing or corrupted, we know it needs to be rebuilt from parity.

So when a drive is HALF-FAILED, we even have a procedure to pull the drive out, and then opportunistically copy whatever files we can recover onto a new drive, then put the new drive back into production. Any files we recover where they are in the correct filesystem location and their SHA1 says they have not been corrupted speeds up the rebuild.

The reason the speed of rebuild is important is the whole concept of 11 or 12 "nines" of durability. We can't have more than 3 drives fail in any one group of 20 drives, and the faster the rebuild time, the less likely for 4 simultaneous failures. It plugs into the formulas in this blog post we did about durability: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-storage-durability/

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#45

Post by jsgo »

linsomniac wrote: post #16

Anything interesting in this one? I've stopped reading them because they all seem to be "Seagates fail kind of a lot but we use them because reasons. HGST doesn't fail a lot, but we also have statistically insignificant numbers of them, so ."

Haven't read this one yet, but Seagates from what I saw in these tended to be okay. It was Western Digital that had, surprisingly, the most issue (which is unfortunate, considering I finally figured out the cheaper method using Best Buy for WD Red disks).

Granted, I'm not a hardware guy so my takeaway could've been wrong, but that's what it looked like to me when reading them.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#46

Post by mjevans »

merlincorey wrote: post #25
linsomniac wrote: post #16

Anything interesting in this one? I've stopped reading them because they all seem to be "Seagates fail kind of a lot but we use them because reasons. HGST doesn't fail a lot, but we also have statistically insignificant numbers of them, so ."

> HGST doesn't fail a lot, but we also have statistically insignificant numbers of them, so ." They have over 20 thousand HGST drives now, according to this year's report, which seems significant to me. They continue to have lower failure rates than the Seagates.

It will be when the drives they just added have had more time in use. The best part of this is that them adding those drives signifies that they were on the market at good prices to add; competition is a good thing for consumers.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#47

Post by atYevP »

zachruss92 wrote: post #31

I really appreciate BackBlaze opening up this data. While I don't purchase HDDs often, I always refer to these reports when deciding. They also open sourced their server chassis which is awesome! It's nice to see a reduction of the failure rates as a whole. It looks like the next few years will be some interesting times for the growth in storage capacities for HDDs.

Yev from Backblaze here -> Glad you're enjoying the stats!

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#48

Post by jsgo »

oliveshell wrote: post #14
alinde wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking as one failure of a 100TB disk has a very different impact of 10 failures of 1TB disks. It'd give some idea on how much data is lost due failures, no?

I suppose, but there’s no such thing as a single HDD that stores 100TB. The biggest you can get currently are (I believe) 14TB helium-filled drives.

My guess is they meant 10TB as it would be a more "equal" comparison:

1 10TB drive

10 1TB drives

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#49

Post by zeroname »

kristofferR wrote: post #40
linsomniac wrote: post #16

Anything interesting in this one? I've stopped reading them because they all seem to be "Seagates fail kind of a lot but we use them because reasons. HGST doesn't fail a lot, but we also have statistically insignificant numbers of them, so ."

Your comment is frankly incredibly arrogant - "I can't be bothered to click and skim through the short post, so hurry up and summarize the contents for me."

Ten people give their opinions, as requested. One person thinks you're arrogant and tells you so.

You can't argue with results.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#50

Post by brianwski »

jl6 wrote: post #42
brianwski wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased. :-) > If you have terabytes to back up, are there still any backup services left that'll let you ship them a drive for a faster initial backup? Backblaze offers a "Backblaze Rapid Ingest Fireball" to allow you to ship us 60 TBytes of data on an appliance. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/introducing-backblazes-rapid-... If you only have 2 - 10 TBytes, I suggest you get a f…

Be wary of freeloading the upload bandwidth on a pipe that belongs to someone else.

I wouldn't advocate for breaking any laws or stealing anything that doesn't belong to you, but a whole lot of places have "totally unused bandwidth" and it won't hurt them at all financially for you to use 1/4 of their unused capacity.

Funny story: I'm kind of unusual that I run an open WiFi hotspot in my home, because I have plenty of unused bandwidth and guests in my house and even neighbors are welcome to borrow some of it anytime. But one of my neighbors one time downloaded illegal content on my WiFi (the exact name of the "True Blood" episode was included, with a date and time), and I got a "cease and desist" letter from the ISP. (sigh) I felt it was pretty rude of my neighbor. I mean, just because I leave my car door open in my driveway doesn't mean it isn't rude of you to use my car as a getaway car in a robbery, you know?

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