8 ms·

I'm not a customer of Backblaze, but I really love how they publish this data for the public. I wish more companies did this kind of thing.

atYevP 9y ago
Yev here -> Thanks, so do we! Honestly we always thought that once we published what we see in our environment that others would follow suite, but that hasn't quite happened yet!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- hwillis 9y ago
  Just throwing in to also express my appreciation. You guys are second only to okcupid in terms of awesome data and visualizations, and I think yours is way more useful. I suppose that depends a lot on one's current life priorities though!
  - atYevP 9y ago
    I...uh...love those folks. <3
- b3lvedere 9y ago
  Again thanks for these stats. I love them and often refer to them when people ask for reliable harddisks, even for consumers. I'm not a really big expert on your file system. How easy is it for you to replace a faulty drive? Just pop it out and put in a brand new one, even if it's other capacity and/or brand and/or model? Is firmware upgrade of harddisks supported? Sometimes i wonder if it's possible to make a sort of small consumer (nas4free?) edition of the storage pod. Must be awesome to use almost any drive and still have a reliable big nas at home.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    It's windows only, but storage spaces is a pretty good match for what you describe. There are still some rough edges, but it's overall a pretty nice setup for me. I setup the virtual drive to require at least 2 copies of the data on the underlying disks (but there are options for 3 copies and more I believe), and then you can add and remove disks to the array kind of whenever you want. They can be different speeds, sizes, whatever.
    - atYevP 9y ago
      Yup yup! ^
- rando444 9y ago
  Are you planning on purchasing more Toshiba drives?
  - atYevP 9y ago
    Only if they reach a price-point that we like! Right now we've been buying up a lot of Seagate drives because they work well and are at a pricing sweet-spot!
    - jaskerr 9y ago
      Which Seagate drives? With your reports, it seems Seagate can be good or terrible.
      - atYevP 9y ago
        We have a large swath of 8TB drives going in that are performing well for us!
wlesieutre 9y ago
Their data[1] recently saved me from snapping up a "deal" on a Seagate 3TB. Of the drives installed in 2012, by 2015 32% had failed, 62% were removed out of caution for failing some diagnostics, and 6% were still in place. Not worth the risk to save $20. I have no way of knowing if Seagate fixed the issues and kept producing them or if they're still trying to dump old stock of bad drives. Thanks, Backblaze! [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Seems like their 4TB series was shitty to the point I wonder how it's possible. Larger drives seem ok though.
  - Elv13 9y ago
    You are reading the data wrong. The 4tb have 5k hours for 400 drives while the others have order of magnitude more spin time. The other type of 4tb have a sample size too small to conclude anything (a single bad batch is possible). Given that the drive failure risk is a curve over time, you need more data. Drives are not reliable when new or very old, but usually ok in between. That being said, I will never ever buy a Seagate HDD again. They joined Maxtor in my blacklist a long time ago. I lost every single one I ever bought (and RMAed) within a year.
- gareim 9y ago
  Recently? Are those faulty Seagate drives still being sold in 2017? EDIT: Ah, I see that you meant you're turned off by 3tb Seagates in general. You could just look at the model number.
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    The bad model is ST3000DM001, and I believe the 001 at the end is a revision number. The one I was looking at was a higher revision number of the same model, but I didn't see any Backblaze data for it and didn't want to bet my data on Seagate having diagnosed/fixed the problem. Got a decent deal on an HGST a few weeks later,
agumonkey 9y ago
I love the fact that they kept doing this on a regular basis even more. It's like a gift.
- brianwski 9y ago
  Brian from Backblaze here. > It's like a gift. We're glad you like it! It isn't hard for us, and we get a little press out of it so it is TOTALLY worth it for us to do. Once we setup all the analysis scripts to pull the data, it's mostly just an automated system. What baffles me is why nobody else reports drive failure stats? I mean, people hear about Backblaze and buy our product because we're providing this data, why don't any OTHER companies want this free stream of customers?
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    Hello, I have no idea why and am wondering too. Maybe a tradition of closeness, or they didn't think it would matter to anyone. Also I think hard drives are a special case because drive reviews are rare if non existant nowadays; and you need large amounts of them to do analysis. Which until companies like your came, was probably relegated to big business only; unlike today where cloud storage is mainstream so the average joe may be involved... I think more sectors should have automated statistics like these; consumer struggles to assess the quality of goods; relying on adhoc comments or tiny (paid) reviews...
    - netsharc 9y ago
      Maybe IoT can be the answer, although not the kind of security hole of devices talking straight to their cloud, the kind of IoT where devices talk to a central command and control device located inside the home. Then this controller can ping the devices/ask for their status and upload a statistics of how often devices say "Repair required.". And obviously no manufacturer will volunteer to do this...
  - cm2187 9y ago
    The other thing I would be extremely keen to hear from is SSD failure stats. But I don't know who would run a large enough park of SSDs to have meaningful stats.
gregmac 9y ago
I was on CrashPlan but just recently decided to switch to B2, backup up a bunch of files from my linux server (which I use as a NAS). I primarily knew of Backblaze from these postings. I basically just have a cron job setup to run b2 sync at 2am, and then kill it at 8am. It generally doesn't take that long to run now, but when I was first syncing everything (couple hundred GB) this allowed it to take place over several days without affecting my daytime bandwidth.
- jsight 9y ago
  Yeah, I had considered doing the same. Unfortunately, BackBlaze still doesn't offer a Linux client for their backup offering. :(
  - brightball 9y ago
    Same. I'm in the crashplan soon to be migrating boat and can't use Backblaze for that same reason.
  - metalliqaz 9y ago
    One of their guys on Reddit said that they intentionally don't offer it because they don't want to attract the datahoarder crowd.
    - jsight 9y ago
      Yeah, they basically don't want people like me (or other Crashplan users for that matter) as a customer. I can't say that I blame them.
  - zackelan 9y ago
    I've been very happy with Borg[0] combined with the B2 command-line tools for Linux backups. I switched from Duplicity + AWS and it reduced the cost as well as made the backup process simpler - Borg doesn't have the same full vs incremental difference to think about, you just take a full backup each time and it dedupes everything automatically. 0: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

atYevP 9y ago

Yev here -> Thanks, so do we! Honestly we always thought that once we published what we see in our environment that others would follow suite, but that hasn't quite happened yet!

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hwillis 9y ago
Just throwing in to also express my appreciation. You guys are second only to okcupid in terms of awesome data and visualizations, and I think yours is way more useful. I suppose that depends a lot on one's current life priorities though!
- atYevP 9y ago
  I...uh...love those folks. <3
b3lvedere 9y ago
Again thanks for these stats. I love them and often refer to them when people ask for reliable harddisks, even for consumers. I'm not a really big expert on your file system. How easy is it for you to replace a faulty drive? Just pop it out and put in a brand new one, even if it's other capacity and/or brand and/or model? Is firmware upgrade of harddisks supported? Sometimes i wonder if it's possible to make a sort of small consumer (nas4free?) edition of the storage pod. Must be awesome to use almost any drive and still have a reliable big nas at home.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  It's windows only, but storage spaces is a pretty good match for what you describe. There are still some rough edges, but it's overall a pretty nice setup for me. I setup the virtual drive to require at least 2 copies of the data on the underlying disks (but there are options for 3 copies and more I believe), and then you can add and remove disks to the array kind of whenever you want. They can be different speeds, sizes, whatever.
  - atYevP 9y ago
    Yup yup! ^
rando444 9y ago
Are you planning on purchasing more Toshiba drives?
- atYevP 9y ago
  Only if they reach a price-point that we like! Right now we've been buying up a lot of Seagate drives because they work well and are at a pricing sweet-spot!
  - jaskerr 9y ago
    Which Seagate drives? With your reports, it seems Seagate can be good or terrible.
    - atYevP 9y ago
      We have a large swath of 8TB drives going in that are performing well for us!

wlesieutre 9y ago

Their data[1] recently saved me from snapping up a "deal" on a Seagate 3TB. Of the drives installed in 2012, by 2015 32% had failed, 62% were removed out of caution for failing some diagnostics, and 6% were still in place. Not worth the risk to save $20. I have no way of knowing if Seagate fixed the issues and kept producing them or if they're still trying to dump old stock of bad drives. Thanks, Backblaze! [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/

agumonkey 9y ago
Seems like their 4TB series was shitty to the point I wonder how it's possible. Larger drives seem ok though.
- Elv13 9y ago
  You are reading the data wrong. The 4tb have 5k hours for 400 drives while the others have order of magnitude more spin time. The other type of 4tb have a sample size too small to conclude anything (a single bad batch is possible). Given that the drive failure risk is a curve over time, you need more data. Drives are not reliable when new or very old, but usually ok in between. That being said, I will never ever buy a Seagate HDD again. They joined Maxtor in my blacklist a long time ago. I lost every single one I ever bought (and RMAed) within a year.
gareim 9y ago
Recently? Are those faulty Seagate drives still being sold in 2017? EDIT: Ah, I see that you meant you're turned off by 3tb Seagates in general. You could just look at the model number.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  The bad model is ST3000DM001, and I believe the 001 at the end is a revision number. The one I was looking at was a higher revision number of the same model, but I didn't see any Backblaze data for it and didn't want to bet my data on Seagate having diagnosed/fixed the problem. Got a decent deal on an HGST a few weeks later,

agumonkey 9y ago

I love the fact that they kept doing this on a regular basis even more. It's like a gift.

brianwski 9y ago
Brian from Backblaze here. > It's like a gift. We're glad you like it! It isn't hard for us, and we get a little press out of it so it is TOTALLY worth it for us to do. Once we setup all the analysis scripts to pull the data, it's mostly just an automated system. What baffles me is why nobody else reports drive failure stats? I mean, people hear about Backblaze and buy our product because we're providing this data, why don't any OTHER companies want this free stream of customers?
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Hello, I have no idea why and am wondering too. Maybe a tradition of closeness, or they didn't think it would matter to anyone. Also I think hard drives are a special case because drive reviews are rare if non existant nowadays; and you need large amounts of them to do analysis. Which until companies like your came, was probably relegated to big business only; unlike today where cloud storage is mainstream so the average joe may be involved... I think more sectors should have automated statistics like these; consumer struggles to assess the quality of goods; relying on adhoc comments or tiny (paid) reviews...
  - netsharc 9y ago
    Maybe IoT can be the answer, although not the kind of security hole of devices talking straight to their cloud, the kind of IoT where devices talk to a central command and control device located inside the home. Then this controller can ping the devices/ask for their status and upload a statistics of how often devices say "Repair required.". And obviously no manufacturer will volunteer to do this...
- cm2187 9y ago
  The other thing I would be extremely keen to hear from is SSD failure stats. But I don't know who would run a large enough park of SSDs to have meaningful stats.

gregmac 9y ago

I was on CrashPlan but just recently decided to switch to B2, backup up a bunch of files from my linux server (which I use as a NAS). I primarily knew of Backblaze from these postings. I basically just have a cron job setup to run b2 sync at 2am, and then kill it at 8am. It generally doesn't take that long to run now, but when I was first syncing everything (couple hundred GB) this allowed it to take place over several days without affecting my daytime bandwidth.

jsight 9y ago
Yeah, I had considered doing the same. Unfortunately, BackBlaze still doesn't offer a Linux client for their backup offering. :(
- brightball 9y ago
  Same. I'm in the crashplan soon to be migrating boat and can't use Backblaze for that same reason.
- metalliqaz 9y ago
  One of their guys on Reddit said that they intentionally don't offer it because they don't want to attract the datahoarder crowd.
  - jsight 9y ago
    Yeah, they basically don't want people like me (or other Crashplan users for that matter) as a customer. I can't say that I blame them.
- zackelan 9y ago
  I've been very happy with Borg[0] combined with the B2 command-line tools for Linux backups. I switched from Duplicity + AWS and it reduced the cost as well as made the backup process simpler - Borg doesn't have the same full vs incremental difference to think about, you just take a full backup each time and it dedupes everything automatically. 0: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/