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Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016
- avitzurel 10y agoReally surprising to me that some disks have 4-5% failure rate yearly. Great data
- Fej 10y agoBackblaze is consistently a great service. Needs a Linux client though.
- atYevP 10y agoYev from Backblaze here -> have you checked out B2? We likely won't have a Linux client for our backup service any time soon, but our B2 service has a lot of integrators (like Cloudberry and Duplicity, HashBackup, etc..) that can back up Linux machines, a lot of folks have been going that route.
- liotier 10y ago> We likely won't have a Linux client for our backup service any time soon Ok. But why ? Technical obstacles such as having to deal with distribution diversity - or is it a way of market segmentation ?
- toomuchtodo 10y agoProbably because the market is too small to justify the developer time when other developers are willing to spend the time integrating their B2 cloud offering as a driver.
- mixedCase 10y agoCrashPlan offers a Linux desktop client, and I believe they're a smaller player than Backblaze.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoCrashPlan made a different decision. If I was to offer an unlimited backup service, I would offer it to novice users, not a small minority of power users and professionals who were going to break the business model with TBs of data. Let's be honest: when people see unlimited, most think "I don't have to worry about how much I'm storing" but a small group thinks "How can I take advantage of this?" Not supporting a Linux client fixes that quickly.
- 5ilv3r 10y ago> Not supporting hackers fixes that quickly. Fixed that for you. We're just trying to maximize our resources and minimize cost. Nothing wrong with that.
- Filligree 10y ago> Let's be honest: when people see unlimited, most think "I don't have to worry about how much I'm storing" but a small group thinks "How can I take advantage of this?" I don't want to take advantage of it. I just happen to have 8TB of data to back up... But backing up that much data over the internet isn't practical in any case.
- leejoramo 10y agoCrashPlan built their system using Java and offers enterprise versions of their clients and servers. They have a very different technology stack and business model.
- zeroer 10y agoTheir MacOS client is amazing, so I doubt it's a technical constraint. My guess is that because they don't have size limits on their backups, if all of their customers are backing up terabytes, Backblaze bleeds money, so they depend on most people only backing up a couple hundred gigabytes. Linux users may have a wildly higher amount of stuff to back up such that it's not profitable. And changing their branding to have mostly unlimited except for some people is probably not too appealing either.
- atYevP 10y agoIt's a mixture of a couple things. One is that we tend to run pretty lean and our engineers are all booked up for the foreseeable future. Linux users are a passionate community, but we can't quite justify the development time for a market segment that is not very large. Additionally, because we run an unlimited model, a lot of people would immediately sign up and back up their Linux servers for $5/month and we'd sail out of business. We could address that by putting in limits for those types of devices and only allowing certain Linux builds, but that adds complexity and we want to keep the backup side of the service very simple - which works for the vast majority of folks. So it's a combination of a bunch of factors. We hoped that developing B2 APIs and CLIs would give Linux folks something that they could use if they needed to have offsite backups or archives and wanted to use our infrastructure cause we're pretty neat. Long-winded answer, but TL:DR - small market segment, development time/cost, possible abuse.
- distances 10y agoIt's worth considering though that the Linux compatibility is worth more than the actual market share. Our company (with roughly 90% Mac / 5% Linux / 5% Windows users) went with Crashplan to have a single backup solution for all of the employees.
- atYevP 10y agoAbsolutely, and that makes perfect sense. Having one system in place definitely beats out multiples. We know we can't be all things for all folks, but Crashplan is great, no hard feelings ;)
- brianwski 10y ago> Technical obstacles...? Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. The underlying base of original client backup software was originally written from scratch on three platforms simultaneously: 1) Windows, 2) Macintosh, and 3) Linux. It was designed that way from the beginning. This code continues to compile every time we do a client release, simply as part of the process. However, it is entirely lacking a GUI layer and an installer - those were never written. The underlying backup engine runs even when the user is logged out or the GUI has stopped working. So it is technically possible, but along the way we released Backblaze B2 (storage API) which not only supports Linux, we assume Linux is the primary customer! We're seeing if that can satisfy the Linux community. Backblaze B2 is a large ongoing effort consuming a lot of our software developer's time. A note about limited resources: Backblaze never really raised any funding, there are no deep pockets, so we can ONLY hire an additional programmer when the products we sell throw off enough money to pay that salary. We run on really tight margins (thus our obsession with failure rates of drives) which is fabulous for our customers, but not so great for hiring lots of extra help to do projects like a Linux GUI. :-)
- jms703 10y agoDuplicity and B2 works well on both Linux and OpenBSD servers.
- izacus 10y agoYeah, not being able to backup the Linux machine at my house means that I really don't want to bother with buying it on my Macs/Windows machines either - having two solutions is a pain :/
- wjnc 10y agoRClone [1] will back up to Backblaze and is a very versatile tool. Why would you want a CLI per hoster, if there are CLIs that target most hosters? Service? [1] http://rclone.org http://rclone.org
- sammoth 10y agoThat's B2 not the standard backup service
- 234dd57d2c8db 10y agoJust use the backblaze API in a script with a cronjob, that's what I do. It's linux, you're going to end up writing some code to get what you want, heh.
- Fej 10y agoWhy do you use Backblaze over, say, CrashPlan, if the latter has a Linux client?
- porker 10y agoAnyone have a reason why the WD30EFRX has such poor reliability in their last table? Granted it's a smaller sample size. Only asking 'cause it's my main data hard drive...
- pfarnsworth 10y agoYeah unfortunately 4/5 of my drives are those as well... gulp...
- devonkim 10y agoIIRC 3TB drives were among the newer drives commercially available at retail when the flooding happened in Thailand and all retail drives were impacted negatively. Furthermore, aggregate capacity is only one factor in the design of a hard drive and most 3TB drives were made in a manner that reduces reliability (more platters of same capacity or fewer platters with greater individual platter capacity, can't quite remember which unfortunately). I don't see why a manufacturer would put the newest technology into product lines that are older so I'd presume that 3TB drives are among the greatest in number of platters and the extra components contributes to the failure rate. Among the least reliable drives I saw in previous reports were Seagate 3TB drives (supposedly they had worse reliability than the legendary IBM Deathstars) and after reading about how 3TB drives were designed across manufacturers years ago during the flooding crisis I decided to avoid 3TB drives entirely. Seems like my decision is finally getting some data to back it up now in hindsight (no pun intended).
- caf 10y agoThe smaller sample size is accounted for by the width of the confidence interval, which is 5.2% - 7.1%; even the low end of that still looks pretty bad.
- leejoramo 10y agoHow are people using Backblaze's excellent hard drive reliability reports in making purchasing decisions? For example when I search for HGST HMS5C4040ALE640 on Amazon I get a dealer selling old out of warrantee drives as new. https://www.amazon.com/HGST-MegaScale-HMS5C4040ALE640-Coolspin-Enterprise/dp/B01K3UV65O https://www.amazon.com/HGST-MegaScale-HMS5C4040ALE640-Coolsp... I get similar results with many of the other drives listed and with other websites such as NewEgg.
- comboy 10y agoI don't always buy the exact models, but I've switched to HGST few years ago after studying Backblaze reports and so far, no regrets (I'm running heavily used postgres on these drives at home)
- trowawee 10y agoNote to self: stay the hell away from Western Digital. Good lord, an 8.2% annualized failure rate? That's unbelievable. They have the first, second, and third worst failure rates on that chart.
- theandrewbailey 10y agoA few years ago, you could have said the same for Seagate. Even worse, actually. Certain models had over 10% failure rate. Some WD models almost had HGST levels of relibility. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update...
- trowawee 10y agoHmmm. Curious. I wonder if Seagate has improved their production somehow to avoid those failure rates, because even with those previous very high rates, they fare much better on the 2013-2016 total chart.
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
- pfarnsworth 10y agoWith hard drive size increasing so quickly but hard drive transfer speeds basically flat, I wonder if there are long-term implications for them with respect to recovery from backup and downtime. For example, if a whole rack goes down, and they are on 32TB drives in the future, for example, could it takes a week or more for their data to get online?
- andy4blaze 10y agoThe Backblaze Vault design mitigates that as the "raid array" is scattered across 20 different Storage Pods in twenty different racks. You'd need more than three racks to go down before you would be offline. Backup systems in place make that highly unlikely. Andy at Backblaze.
- fpp 10y agoI'll see from your reports that you're migrating 1000s of 2TB drives to 8TB drives - what is actually happening to your old 2TB drives? Guess you are not throwing those away so what are you doing with them.
- brianwski 10y agoDisclaimer: I work at Backblaze. We securely wipe the drives, then we sell them to a "used hard drive reseller".
- SteveNuts 10y agoI know it's a lot easier to wholesale resell them, but it'd be so awesome if you could dedicate a portion to be sold to the homelabbers among us.
- jerguismi 10y agoI don't know how that would be more awesome, essentially spending effort towards the upper middle-class hobbyists. I would rather see them sell them directly to the highest bidder and focus the effort on improving their business, or give the drives to charity.
- joshdance 10y agohttps://www.backblaze.com/blog/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ - 404 right now?
- executive 10y ago404 File Not Found Not so reliable I gather
- atYevP 10y agoYev from backblaze here -> Yea we're kicking a server or two, it's been loading slow from all the traffic so we put top men on it. TOP MEN!
- trowawee 10y agoLooks like they're offline. Google cache link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DNdyZ1o9QqwJ:https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q3-2016/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DNdyZ1...
- andy4blaze 10y agoWebsite is fine, Backup service is fine. Blog is overloaded and we're working on it.
- MrMullen 10y agoYou should really consider moving this webpage and report to something like AWS S3 when you first release it. Then move back to your usual servers when traffic has fallen off. Your poor servers must melt down when this shows up on Hacker News and Slashdot.
- atYevP 10y agoInternally we're blaming our SEO people for putting to much crap on the blog itself ;) But yea, it's worth exploring - though we have our own servers that should be able to handle the load. We haven't had blog loading trouble in a while, so it'll be neat to debug this later :D
- PuffinBlue 10y agoFrom the outside it looks like your running a fairly intensive Wordpress install on an Apache webserver with no page caching. Also seems there's no minification or combining of stylesheets/js and there are query strings on those static assets which is going to discourage caching. No wonder you need a datacenter to handle that kind of resource punishment! There are plenty of reasons to stick with Wordpress in a decent sized corporation but if not switching to a static site at least stick W3TC on there so you're minimising your server load and serving out static html and minified/combined resources. You could then consider using Varnish in front of Apache or maybe nginx with a FastCGI cache. I"m sure you've got some folks in the team who could whip up a W3TC install in 10 minutes.
- Shivetya 10y agoWhere do retired hard drives go? Do you have in house recycling or contract it out?
- andy4blaze 10y agoIn the Backblaze case, they are securely wiped clean and then recycled.
- swang 10y agoWhat does Backblaze do with all the removed HD that still work but maybe have a ton of cycles on them? Are they just recycled, or resold?
- brianwski 10y agoDisclaimer: I work at Backblaze. We securely wipe the drives, then we sell them to a "used hard drive reseller".
- meritt 10y agoWe have about 20TB in an AWS S3 bucket we'd like to backup somewhere separate from Amazon. Is there any chance of Backblaze offering ingestion from an Amazon Snowball export (https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/)?
- atYevP 10y agoYev from Backblaze here -> Believe Snowball is encrypted and fairly locked down, not sure we could do that.
- arekkas 10y agoWhy aren't you using tapes? Wouldn't that be more suited for back ups - larger and less failures. You probably don't have a lot of reads anyways?
- atYevP 10y agoYev from Backblaze here -> Tape tends to have much higher read times, and can even be more expensive than hard drives in some cases. Since we have Backblaze B2 the data needs to be highly available.
- caf 10y agoIt's fantastic to see the confidence interval quoted in those latter tables (I assume 95%?) - that's far more informative than just the mean failure rate.