3 ms·
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
by 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 agoPopulation 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.