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I've been reading these reports since 2012(13?) and have used them multiple times to buy hard drives for my home storage systems, I haven't always had similar r

I've been reading these reports since 2012(13?) and have used them multiple times to buy hard drives for my home storage systems, I haven't always had similar results however. Does anyone else use these posts to pick their own personal disks? If so do you see the data given as a good indicator of lifespan or is the home environment vs DC just too different?

redorb 7y ago
comparing the results of your small scale personal drive purchases to their larger scale won't perfectly align. Their numbers are an average over a large number of drives - your number is picking 1 of their drive randomly and giving the number etc.. it's shouldn't hurt to use their numbers to guide your decision it is no guarantee though.
roddux 7y ago
I've sworn by HGST drives since BackBlaze have repeatedly covered their impressively low failure rate. They've worked well for me.
- swarnie_ 7y ago
  Maybe i'll give these a try next, my slow lab environment is due a refresh around new years. Thanks!
mbreese 7y ago
The statistics of small sample sizes comes into play here. The small sample size of a personal environment doesn't lend itself well to comparisons to a large sample size of a cloud storage provider. For example, their 2% failure rate of Vendor X drives doesn't mean anything to you if you don't have enough drives. Your few drives might be in the 2% or the 98%. The 2% failure rate is only applicable to the population of drives as a total. It doesn't tell you anything about your drives in particular. Now, on top of that, their usage patterns don't necessarily reflect what a typical user would see on their personal computer. I suspect that their read/write patterns skew towards the write-once, read-rarely category. Even for a typical enterprise datacenter, their usage patterns are going to be different.
- arrrg 7y ago
  I’m not really sure what you statistical point there is. If Vendor A has a 2 percent failure rate and Vendor B has a 3 percent failure rate it’s still valid to conclude that you would be less likely to have a failure with Vendor A even if you only ever buy one drive. Home use being not comparable to their usage patterns is a valid argument, but your statistical argument seems like nonsense to me.
  - mbreese 7y ago
    Population level statistics aren’t informative at the individual sample level. If you buy 100 hard drives, a 2% failure rate makes sense and you can reason what it means. You’d expect two of those drives to fail in a year. But what does that mean if you only buy two drives total? An individual drive can’t fail by 2%. It has either failed or it hasn’t (ignoring bad blocks, etc). So, for home use, the Backblaze statistics are interesting, but can you really tell the difference between a 2% failure rate and a 3% failure rate when you buy a small number or drives (or likely just one)? You’re most likely to not see any failures from either vendor, as they have a success rate of either 97 or 98%. It’s only when your sample sizes get sufficiently large that these failure rates start to have a good predictive value.
sundvor 7y ago
I wish they were around when I bought 4x IBM Deskstar 60GBs in a RAID 10 in the early 2000s....
- kijin 7y ago
  HGST has indeed come a long way since their Deathstar days.
- sneak 7y ago
  I had a moment like that recently holding a 512GB micro sd card - recalled buying a pair of 40GB drives around that time to mirror using pre-mdadm linux raid. Living in the future is cool.
beatgammit 7y ago
In my opinion, you really can't rely on statistics for personal drives because your sample size is so small. The important things for me when considering a drive are (in rough order of importance): - warranty and customer service - price - noise - performance You can get lucky and have a drive that lasts 10 years, or you can get unlucky and have a drive die in days. Either way, you'll need a solid backup strategy and be able to be without the drive for a week or two. That being said, I appreciate the data that they put out, and it makes me want to use their service more. I think it's interesting that they continue to use Seagate drives more than most others despite them having higher failure rates, which reminds me that you really need to look at it from a cost/benefit perspective. It's also interesting to see just how reliable drives are (on average) even when used improperly. In short, no, I don't think they should be used when deciding which drive to buy. All drives are pretty good, so find the one that's going to make ownership and replacement the most pleasant.
- brianwski 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > The important things for me when considering a drive are ... noise For a drive in the same room as me, I TOTALLY agree and I'm surprised this isn't mentioned more often. Before I switched to all SSDs in my desktop computers I ran cables through the drywall in my apartment so I could put the (noisy) computer in a closet in the other room and put the monitor, keyboard, and mouse in the quiet room with myself. Besides the wonderful performance, SSDs are magical to me because they are quiet. I am very willing to pay a premium just to be free of that drive seeking and grinding.
linsomniac 7y ago
I come here for the opposite: I've already picked my disks (HGST), and I read the Backblaze report to raise my fist and yell "Y U still use Seagate!?!"
- beatgammit 7y ago
  Because Seagate is cheaper. If a drive dies 5% sooner and costs 10% less, you buy the cheaper drive. For personal drives in small quantities, you're basically operating on luck. You can get a bad HGST drive just like you can get a bad Seagate drive. I've had drives from HGST, WD, and Seagate and all of them have lasted far beyond the warranty expiration. When I look into drives for small-scale personal use (NAS, desktop, etc), I check recent reviews about warranty and customer service, then buy based on price and features. I also buy drives based on the use case (NAS drives for NAS, desktop drives for desktop, etc).
  - linsomniac 7y ago
    (Clarify: I agree with what you're saying, but...) You need to add "cost to repair" into your equation. At my old job we used to figure $300 to replace a drive (scheduling maintenance window with customer, taking backup, migrating/quiescing services), replacing drive, verifying services were happy, wiping or destroying old drive, managing RMA, qualifying/burning in new drive). YMMV depending on policies and procedures. If I were Backblaze, I'd design the system to work equally well with 40 drives as with 45, and consider just leaving bad drives in until a handful of them need replacing in a chassis. And the replacement be basically automatic. This version of the report is much closer than they've been in the past. Seems like Seagate might be making some improvements. IIRC, it was not uncommon for Seagates to be a 10x higher failure than HSGT in the past.
    - dwild 7y ago
      > If I were Backblaze, I'd design the system to work equally well with 40 drives as with 45, and consider just leaving bad drives in until a handful of them need replacing in a chassis. And the replacement be basically automatic. They designed their own replication scheme which allows quite a bit of disk to fail. Considering that, using RAID would be absurd so I'm pretty sure they are all configured as JBOD, thus allowing this kind of replacement.
esaym 7y ago
I would like to buy the drives they use... but they seem to only be able to be purchased from enterprise resellers in large quantities.

redorb 7y ago

comparing the results of your small scale personal drive purchases to their larger scale won't perfectly align. Their numbers are an average over a large number of drives - your number is picking 1 of their drive randomly and giving the number etc.. it's shouldn't hurt to use their numbers to guide your decision it is no guarantee though.

roddux 7y ago

I've sworn by HGST drives since BackBlaze have repeatedly covered their impressively low failure rate. They've worked well for me.

swarnie_ 7y ago
Maybe i'll give these a try next, my slow lab environment is due a refresh around new years. Thanks!

mbreese 7y ago

The statistics of small sample sizes comes into play here. The small sample size of a personal environment doesn't lend itself well to comparisons to a large sample size of a cloud storage provider. For example, their 2% failure rate of Vendor X drives doesn't mean anything to you if you don't have enough drives. Your few drives might be in the 2% or the 98%. The 2% failure rate is only applicable to the population of drives as a total. It doesn't tell you anything about your drives in particular. Now, on top of that, their usage patterns don't necessarily reflect what a typical user would see on their personal computer. I suspect that their read/write patterns skew towards the write-once, read-rarely category. Even for a typical enterprise datacenter, their usage patterns are going to be different.

arrrg 7y ago
I’m not really sure what you statistical point there is. If Vendor A has a 2 percent failure rate and Vendor B has a 3 percent failure rate it’s still valid to conclude that you would be less likely to have a failure with Vendor A even if you only ever buy one drive. Home use being not comparable to their usage patterns is a valid argument, but your statistical argument seems like nonsense to me.
- mbreese 7y ago
  Population level statistics aren’t informative at the individual sample level. If you buy 100 hard drives, a 2% failure rate makes sense and you can reason what it means. You’d expect two of those drives to fail in a year. But what does that mean if you only buy two drives total? An individual drive can’t fail by 2%. It has either failed or it hasn’t (ignoring bad blocks, etc). So, for home use, the Backblaze statistics are interesting, but can you really tell the difference between a 2% failure rate and a 3% failure rate when you buy a small number or drives (or likely just one)? You’re most likely to not see any failures from either vendor, as they have a success rate of either 97 or 98%. It’s only when your sample sizes get sufficiently large that these failure rates start to have a good predictive value.

sundvor 7y ago

I wish they were around when I bought 4x IBM Deskstar 60GBs in a RAID 10 in the early 2000s....

kijin 7y ago
HGST has indeed come a long way since their Deathstar days.
sneak 7y ago
I had a moment like that recently holding a 512GB micro sd card - recalled buying a pair of 40GB drives around that time to mirror using pre-mdadm linux raid. Living in the future is cool.

beatgammit 7y ago

In my opinion, you really can't rely on statistics for personal drives because your sample size is so small. The important things for me when considering a drive are (in rough order of importance): - warranty and customer service - price - noise - performance You can get lucky and have a drive that lasts 10 years, or you can get unlucky and have a drive die in days. Either way, you'll need a solid backup strategy and be able to be without the drive for a week or two. That being said, I appreciate the data that they put out, and it makes me want to use their service more. I think it's interesting that they continue to use Seagate drives more than most others despite them having higher failure rates, which reminds me that you really need to look at it from a cost/benefit perspective. It's also interesting to see just how reliable drives are (on average) even when used improperly. In short, no, I don't think they should be used when deciding which drive to buy. All drives are pretty good, so find the one that's going to make ownership and replacement the most pleasant.

brianwski 7y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > The important things for me when considering a drive are ... noise For a drive in the same room as me, I TOTALLY agree and I'm surprised this isn't mentioned more often. Before I switched to all SSDs in my desktop computers I ran cables through the drywall in my apartment so I could put the (noisy) computer in a closet in the other room and put the monitor, keyboard, and mouse in the quiet room with myself. Besides the wonderful performance, SSDs are magical to me because they are quiet. I am very willing to pay a premium just to be free of that drive seeking and grinding.

linsomniac 7y ago

I come here for the opposite: I've already picked my disks (HGST), and I read the Backblaze report to raise my fist and yell "Y U still use Seagate!?!"

beatgammit 7y ago
Because Seagate is cheaper. If a drive dies 5% sooner and costs 10% less, you buy the cheaper drive. For personal drives in small quantities, you're basically operating on luck. You can get a bad HGST drive just like you can get a bad Seagate drive. I've had drives from HGST, WD, and Seagate and all of them have lasted far beyond the warranty expiration. When I look into drives for small-scale personal use (NAS, desktop, etc), I check recent reviews about warranty and customer service, then buy based on price and features. I also buy drives based on the use case (NAS drives for NAS, desktop drives for desktop, etc).
- linsomniac 7y ago
  (Clarify: I agree with what you're saying, but...) You need to add "cost to repair" into your equation. At my old job we used to figure $300 to replace a drive (scheduling maintenance window with customer, taking backup, migrating/quiescing services), replacing drive, verifying services were happy, wiping or destroying old drive, managing RMA, qualifying/burning in new drive). YMMV depending on policies and procedures. If I were Backblaze, I'd design the system to work equally well with 40 drives as with 45, and consider just leaving bad drives in until a handful of them need replacing in a chassis. And the replacement be basically automatic. This version of the report is much closer than they've been in the past. Seems like Seagate might be making some improvements. IIRC, it was not uncommon for Seagates to be a 10x higher failure than HSGT in the past.
  - dwild 7y ago
    > If I were Backblaze, I'd design the system to work equally well with 40 drives as with 45, and consider just leaving bad drives in until a handful of them need replacing in a chassis. And the replacement be basically automatic. They designed their own replication scheme which allows quite a bit of disk to fail. Considering that, using RAID would be absurd so I'm pretty sure they are all configured as JBOD, thus allowing this kind of replacement.

esaym 7y ago

I would like to buy the drives they use... but they seem to only be able to be purchased from enterprise resellers in large quantities.