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Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q3 2019

197 points by garaetjjte 7y ago

briffle 7y ago
Interesting how the checksumming process sounds very much like zfs's scrubbing process. One of the reasons I trust zfs with my large data volumes is because it proactively looks for problems and fixes them. (and most filesystems really can't look/check)
DanCarvajal 7y ago
This is my favorite kind of content marketing.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mikece 7y ago
And is there any reason to not trust WD Red drives in my home NAS?
- brandmeyer 7y ago
  The plural of anecdote is not data. The point of backblaze's publication is to share statistical data with the public at large. Their dataset doesn't include any WD Red drives, therefore, the data does not provide a statement about WD Red drives' reliability in either direction. Consider this: the least reliable drive in this dataset has a 2.7% annualized failure rate at an average age of almost 4 years. That's low enough that many SOHO users will never see a failure, yet high enough that a rack worth will have seen more than one failure recently. Thus, your question could be answered with complete honesty in both ways: with anecdotes by happy users and with anecdotes by unhappy users. Therefore, neither positive nor negative answers are useful to you. This phenomenon underlies the fundamental weakness of self-reported online reviews. You cannot actually get a useful measurement for how reliable a product is solely by self-reported sparse feedback.
- ahnick 7y ago
  You shouldn't trust any drive. Trust in probabilities to protect you. You should be backing up your NAS to either a cloud provider, an external drive (if data will fit), or another NAS. Make sure to locate one copy offsite and practice restoring from your backup.
- kabdib 7y ago
  All drives will fail. You're just buying time (or rather, the likelihood of getting more time out of the drive). I've had a couple of WD reds fail. You pop in another and rebuild the volume. It's normal as long as it's not too often.
- nolok 7y ago
  Your question makes no sense. Any drive can and will fail, and no matter the brand it may fail immediately or it may last years. The rule is to avoid all of your drive being from the same factory date/batch, even if they're all from the same brand order from different stores or whatever to help make sure in case of a defect they're not all affected. Also for home NAS ensure you have redundancy (a proper raid level, avoid JBOD and Raid-0), and have backups. Raid is not a backup.
  - hddherman 7y ago
    I would add data integrity to the list, in addition to redundancy and backups. ZFS is great in this regard: redundancy, data scrubbing to ensure data integrity and built-in snapshotting and data replication features (zfs send-receive). Can't believe how I got by without ZFS in my earlier years of data hoarding.
    - nolok 7y ago
      Absolutely right, most home Nas don't have zfs but can use btrfs, which helps protect against bit rot and offers proper data scrubbing.
- zlynx 7y ago
  I trust the Reds. Although, as someone else just said, it's an anecdote, not real data like the Backblaze report. I started my NAS in 2012 with two 2 TB Red drives. Later I added two 6 TB Red drives. Some time, around 2016 I think, one of the 2 TB Reds failed and I replaced it with another 6 TB. Then the other 2 TB Red failed, like a year later and I put in another 6 TB so they all matched. I did not get replacements even though one failed during its warranty period (I am pretty sure the 2 TB Reds still had a 5-yr warranty at that time), because I wanted to replace it with a 6 TB anyway. Currently all four 6 TB drives are still running, plus a couple of 4 TB Toshibas I grabbed at some point. So, I don't think that drive failure after 4 or 5 years is so bad. I got my money's worth anyway, and that's why a NAS has redundant drives.
- myself248 7y ago
  In reality, there are only two kinds of hard drive: Those which have already failed, and those which will.
- bscphil 7y ago
  Practically speaking there's no way to avoid them (or their white-label equivalents) if you're on a typical home budget and you buy any significant number of drives. They're just too cheap (when you get the Easystores) compared to any other way of acquiring a large amount of disk space. I'd rather buy WD than Seagate, but that's just me. I don't really have a choice. Maybe the only people who have a choice are either in the enterprise or buying one drive every few years for a PC build or something.
piepoter 7y ago
Shout out to Seagate, every drive that my friends and I have bought from them have eventually failed, good to see that they fail in non-consumer use too, not just me! Stick to the Western Digitals.
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here from Backblaze -> The Western Digital drives that you've purchased will fail too. That's part of the whole point of these reports, all of the drives eventually fail out or reach a state where we have to replace them - it's not any one specific manufacturer. That's part of why having a backup is so important, even the SSDs in newer machines will eventually go wonky.
  - Scramblejams 7y ago
    Thanks for posting this data! I love it! I appreciate your diplomatic language, but the time to failure does matter, and consumers don’t have the same cost structure that incentivizes replacing working drives the way you do. FWIW I share GP’s experience with Seagate. I had quite a few of them, ranging in size from 500 gigs to 2TB. Every last one of them died relatively quickly, while most of my Hitachis, Toshibas, and WDs from that era still work. Seagate earned a permanent boycott from this customer.
    - cheeze 7y ago
      WD isn't much better, but Backblaze stats have consistently shown Seagate to be higher failure rate than everybody else out there. Good riddance.
      - vorticalbox 7y ago
        As noted above all driver will fail, though I get your point I think saying that seagate driver time to fail is lower is a fairer statement.
      - inferiorhuman 7y ago
riobard 7y ago
I must have missed it somehow, but what is the difference between boot drives and data drives in a typical Backblaze server other than the boot drives store the OS? Obviously you don’t need 8TB capacity solely for the OS, I’d assume you also store user data on boot drives? In which case why is there a distinction?
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here from Backblaze -> Mainly it's the OS and log files - the reason we make a distinction is that the boot drives typically do not have as much load as the data drives, so it wouldn't be a real 1:1 comparison.
  - riobard 7y ago
    Thanks! What’s the capacity and utilization rate of those boot drives, then?
    - andy4blaze 7y ago
      Andy from Backblaze here: The capacity of the boot drives ranges from 80 to 500gb typically. They are mostly hard drives with some SSDs added recently. We are switching over to SSDs for boot drives. The workload is reasonable, but on the higher side as they not only boot the systems, they also are used to store log files temporarily - so lots of reads, writes, and deletes. Since we only have a little over 2,000, any data we published not be very accurate. If you are really interested, the boot drive data is in the data files we publish each quarter.
      - riobard 7y ago
        Thanks for the pointer! :)
akersten 7y ago
These stats are wonderful and make me really appreciate the culture of the company. I've been considering becoming a customer because of these posts, since they reflect a lot of pride in the craft and care for the community. But I'm stuck on one thing. Does Backblaze offer a solution for Linux backup? I've got an NFS server running that I use for home storage that I want to back up - but looks like Backblaze is only offering a Windows or Mac client. Maybe the business version would work, since it claims to support NAS backup. But then the pricing seems lower than the personal edition (60$/computer/year = 5$/month < 6$/month) - unless that's implying that every computer that accesses the NAS is part of the fee? So I guess: is there a reasonable Linux offering for home users from Backblaze? If not, what service do folks suggest?
- garaetjjte 7y ago
  They probably don't want using their "unlimited" 6$/month plan for terabytes of data. They also have B2 priced by stored amount, but they don't provide software: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?use-case=backup&platform=linux https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?use-case=back...
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here from Backblaze -> the Computer Backup service does not offer an unlimited Linux backup service. We do have support for Linux with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and our integration partners (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?platform=linux https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?platform=linu... - I filtered the list by Linux for you). On the business side the NAS backup is also done via our parnterships and B2. On the consumer end, we haven't found a way to make unlimited backup sustainable with NAS/Linux since those devices/platforms typically have WAY more data than the average user.
  - techntoke 7y ago
    How do you suspect that CrashPlan is making it sustainable?
    - 7y ago
probo23 7y ago
Is Blackblaze used mainly as a backup solution? Can anyone give me a use case?
- jseutter 7y ago
  Assuming you mean Backblaze and not Blackblaze.. I have data that is important to me (family photos, etc.) on my hard drive. I have a backups of that data running on a Raspberry Pi with an attached drive. If my house gets broken into, or burns down, or hit by a tornado, basically something Really Bad, Backblaze has a copy of my data offsite. It is tempting to use Backblaze as my only backup, but like they describe on their site, their primary value is as a backup of your backups. Normally you should never have to use them, and if you do, it will be slow. Now if you are in a hurry they offer a service to ship you your data on a thumb drive or hard drive, but that gives you an idea of their primary use.
  - anchpop 7y ago
    Amusingly, blackblaze.com redirects to backblaze.com. I assume people have made that mistake before.
    - bluedino 7y ago
      Yes, they did and they even wrote a blog post about it: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-site/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-s...
      - atYevP 7y ago
        Yea, that was a fun "should we do this" conversation around the office...
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here from Backblaze -> the company started by providing unlimited online backup, and that's a great industry for us. About 4 years ago we released Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, which allows developers or sysadmins or enthusiasts to directly upload/retrieve data to/from our data centers. Our core competency is data storage - so while most folks do use us for a backup (either of their Mac or PC on the consumer side or servers/NAS devices with B2 Cloud storage) - what we really do is store and retrieve data.
nolok 7y ago
There was a post from BackBlaze a year (?) or so back where they commented on the Toshiba low failure rate with something along the lines of "they seem really reliable, but we buy in bulk and just don't have enough offers at low price for those, otherwise we would buy a lot of them". Well I run a couple dozen Synology NAS in professionnal setup, as well as two in personnal setup (mine and my parents'), and ever since that post I made the experiment of having almost 50% of all drives be Toshibas, and I have to say they do seem to be much more reliable (on the scale of "why do every other drive from Seagate and WD keep dying first, and often their replacement dies first too"). It is still a scale of use where it's mostly anecdotical rather than verifiable data, so don't take this fun comment for more than that. But I suspect a lot of people reading these posts are not interested for some large scale setup or anything like that but rather to know which drives to put in their home computer or NAS, and honestly I can highly recommend the Toshiba for that. They do tend to be a bit more expensive (around 10% more ? I buy them from ldlc.com and grosbill.com , french IT stores, no bulk buying or anything like that) Of course no matter the brand never expect no failure and a Toshiba drive may just as much die in the first ten minutes so always plan for it.
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> Yea, the Toshiba drives are great! If the price was lower, they'd likely play a larger role in our hard drive mix!
  - jl6 7y ago
    If they need replacing less often, then presumably you’d be willing to spend more on them, so do I infer that they are sufficiently more expensive to wipe out the benefits of greater reliability?
    - atYevP 7y ago
      Yev here -> Yes, that's basically the trade-off for us. Is the drive available and reliable vs. how much does it cost. One of the reasons we have so many Seagate drives is because they are available in abundance, are affordable for us, and have failure rates in-line with the other drives that we're testing.
kortilla 7y ago
Off-topic but sort of related: is there a hard drive tower designed specifically for a pool of SSDs? The one I have for 8 3.5 bays could easily fit twice as many of the little SSDs...
- jaclaz 7y ago
  You mean something like these? (not "tower" though) https://www.addonics.com/category/sda.php https://www.addonics.com/category/sda.php
- myself248 7y ago
  The term "mobile rack" will find some of the densest ways to shove, for instance, eight 2.5" drives into a single 5.25" bay. That can get you some serious density in one of those "cdrom duplicator" tower cases that's all drive-bays, but heaven help you on the controller side.
gwern 7y ago
> By increasing the shard integrity check rate, we potentially moved failures that were going to be found in the future into Q3. While discovering potential problems earlier is a good thing, it is possible that the hard drive failures recorded in Q3 could then be artificially high as future failures were dragged forward into the quarter. Given that our Annualized Failure Rate calculation is based on Drive Days and Drive Failures, potentially moving up some number of failures into Q3 could cause an artificial spike in the Q3 Annualized Failure Rates. This is what we will be monitoring over the coming quarters. Wouldn't survival analysis on interval-censored data handle this problem automatically? All of your observations of failure presumably are actually interval data, where all you know is that the drive failed sometime in between the last good check and the first bad check. Then it doesn't matter if some time periods have large intervals and others have small intervals, that just affects the precision of estimates.
kbutler 7y ago
I love these articles - I'd also love an update to the cost curves: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ (2017) It looks like after stalling in 2017-2018, $/GB has dropped again - https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm - but JCM doesn't have the large sample sizes Backblaze does.
roddux 7y ago
I've been following these since maybe 2016? I don't remember when they started. It's striking to note that for as long as I recall, HGST still holds the crown of lowest annualised failure rate across the board.
h1d 7y ago
The only reason I use other storage provider than backblaze is simply because of the benchmark done by one of the more modern backup tool author. https://github.com/gilbertchen/cloud-storage-comparison/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/gilbertchen/cloud-storage-comparison/blob... Can anyone from backblaze say anything about their performance compared to other vendors? The pricing is certainly ahead of others, so I would use if the performance is comparable to some of the leading group tested there.
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here -> well that chart hasn't been updated in a while. For starters we're just $0.01/GB for downloads (we dropped the price last year). Our performance is generally pretty good, and we're partnered with cloudflare (free egress) if you need more umph. But most of the time folks don't have any issues with just our regular service.
ksec 7y ago
I wonder If Backblaze will eventually offer some sort of consumer solution to Backup. An App on iOS, Android, Mac and Windows that simplifies backup to your Backblaze NAS, that Backup to B2 as well.

197 points by garaetjjte 7y ago

Interesting how the checksumming process sounds very much like zfs's scrubbing process. One of the reasons I trust zfs with my large data volumes is because it proactively looks for problems and fixes them. (and most filesystems really can't look/check)

DanCarvajal 7y ago

This is my favorite kind of content marketing.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mikece 7y ago

And is there any reason to not trust WD Red drives in my home NAS?

brandmeyer 7y ago
The plural of anecdote is not data. The point of backblaze's publication is to share statistical data with the public at large. Their dataset doesn't include any WD Red drives, therefore, the data does not provide a statement about WD Red drives' reliability in either direction. Consider this: the least reliable drive in this dataset has a 2.7% annualized failure rate at an average age of almost 4 years. That's low enough that many SOHO users will never see a failure, yet high enough that a rack worth will have seen more than one failure recently. Thus, your question could be answered with complete honesty in both ways: with anecdotes by happy users and with anecdotes by unhappy users. Therefore, neither positive nor negative answers are useful to you. This phenomenon underlies the fundamental weakness of self-reported online reviews. You cannot actually get a useful measurement for how reliable a product is solely by self-reported sparse feedback.
ahnick 7y ago
You shouldn't trust any drive. Trust in probabilities to protect you. You should be backing up your NAS to either a cloud provider, an external drive (if data will fit), or another NAS. Make sure to locate one copy offsite and practice restoring from your backup.
kabdib 7y ago
All drives will fail. You're just buying time (or rather, the likelihood of getting more time out of the drive). I've had a couple of WD reds fail. You pop in another and rebuild the volume. It's normal as long as it's not too often.
nolok 7y ago
Your question makes no sense. Any drive can and will fail, and no matter the brand it may fail immediately or it may last years. The rule is to avoid all of your drive being from the same factory date/batch, even if they're all from the same brand order from different stores or whatever to help make sure in case of a defect they're not all affected. Also for home NAS ensure you have redundancy (a proper raid level, avoid JBOD and Raid-0), and have backups. Raid is not a backup.
- hddherman 7y ago
  I would add data integrity to the list, in addition to redundancy and backups. ZFS is great in this regard: redundancy, data scrubbing to ensure data integrity and built-in snapshotting and data replication features (zfs send-receive). Can't believe how I got by without ZFS in my earlier years of data hoarding.
  - nolok 7y ago
    Absolutely right, most home Nas don't have zfs but can use btrfs, which helps protect against bit rot and offers proper data scrubbing.
zlynx 7y ago
I trust the Reds. Although, as someone else just said, it's an anecdote, not real data like the Backblaze report. I started my NAS in 2012 with two 2 TB Red drives. Later I added two 6 TB Red drives. Some time, around 2016 I think, one of the 2 TB Reds failed and I replaced it with another 6 TB. Then the other 2 TB Red failed, like a year later and I put in another 6 TB so they all matched. I did not get replacements even though one failed during its warranty period (I am pretty sure the 2 TB Reds still had a 5-yr warranty at that time), because I wanted to replace it with a 6 TB anyway. Currently all four 6 TB drives are still running, plus a couple of 4 TB Toshibas I grabbed at some point. So, I don't think that drive failure after 4 or 5 years is so bad. I got my money's worth anyway, and that's why a NAS has redundant drives.
myself248 7y ago
In reality, there are only two kinds of hard drive: Those which have already failed, and those which will.
bscphil 7y ago
Practically speaking there's no way to avoid them (or their white-label equivalents) if you're on a typical home budget and you buy any significant number of drives. They're just too cheap (when you get the Easystores) compared to any other way of acquiring a large amount of disk space. I'd rather buy WD than Seagate, but that's just me. I don't really have a choice. Maybe the only people who have a choice are either in the enterprise or buying one drive every few years for a PC build or something.

piepoter 7y ago

Shout out to Seagate, every drive that my friends and I have bought from them have eventually failed, good to see that they fail in non-consumer use too, not just me! Stick to the Western Digitals.

atYevP 7y ago
Yev here from Backblaze -> The Western Digital drives that you've purchased will fail too. That's part of the whole point of these reports, all of the drives eventually fail out or reach a state where we have to replace them - it's not any one specific manufacturer. That's part of why having a backup is so important, even the SSDs in newer machines will eventually go wonky.
- Scramblejams 7y ago
  Thanks for posting this data! I love it! I appreciate your diplomatic language, but the time to failure does matter, and consumers don’t have the same cost structure that incentivizes replacing working drives the way you do. FWIW I share GP’s experience with Seagate. I had quite a few of them, ranging in size from 500 gigs to 2TB. Every last one of them died relatively quickly, while most of my Hitachis, Toshibas, and WDs from that era still work. Seagate earned a permanent boycott from this customer.
  - cheeze 7y ago
    WD isn't much better, but Backblaze stats have consistently shown Seagate to be higher failure rate than everybody else out there. Good riddance.
    - vorticalbox 7y ago
      As noted above all driver will fail, though I get your point I think saying that seagate driver time to fail is lower is a fairer statement.
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago

riobard 7y ago

I must have missed it somehow, but what is the difference between boot drives and data drives in a typical Backblaze server other than the boot drives store the OS? Obviously you don’t need 8TB capacity solely for the OS, I’d assume you also store user data on boot drives? In which case why is there a distinction?

atYevP 7y ago
Yev here from Backblaze -> Mainly it's the OS and log files - the reason we make a distinction is that the boot drives typically do not have as much load as the data drives, so it wouldn't be a real 1:1 comparison.
- riobard 7y ago
  Thanks! What’s the capacity and utilization rate of those boot drives, then?
  - andy4blaze 7y ago
    Andy from Backblaze here: The capacity of the boot drives ranges from 80 to 500gb typically. They are mostly hard drives with some SSDs added recently. We are switching over to SSDs for boot drives. The workload is reasonable, but on the higher side as they not only boot the systems, they also are used to store log files temporarily - so lots of reads, writes, and deletes. Since we only have a little over 2,000, any data we published not be very accurate. If you are really interested, the boot drive data is in the data files we publish each quarter.
    - riobard 7y ago
      Thanks for the pointer! :)

akersten 7y ago

These stats are wonderful and make me really appreciate the culture of the company. I've been considering becoming a customer because of these posts, since they reflect a lot of pride in the craft and care for the community. But I'm stuck on one thing. Does Backblaze offer a solution for Linux backup? I've got an NFS server running that I use for home storage that I want to back up - but looks like Backblaze is only offering a Windows or Mac client. Maybe the business version would work, since it claims to support NAS backup. But then the pricing seems lower than the personal edition (60$/computer/year = 5$/month < 6$/month) - unless that's implying that every computer that accesses the NAS is part of the fee? So I guess: is there a reasonable Linux offering for home users from Backblaze? If not, what service do folks suggest?

garaetjjte 7y ago
They probably don't want using their "unlimited" 6$/month plan for terabytes of data. They also have B2 priced by stored amount, but they don't provide software: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?use-case=backup&platform=linux https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?use-case=back...
atYevP 7y ago
Yev here from Backblaze -> the Computer Backup service does not offer an unlimited Linux backup service. We do have support for Linux with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and our integration partners (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?platform=linux https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?platform=linu... - I filtered the list by Linux for you). On the business side the NAS backup is also done via our parnterships and B2. On the consumer end, we haven't found a way to make unlimited backup sustainable with NAS/Linux since those devices/platforms typically have WAY more data than the average user.
- techntoke 7y ago
  How do you suspect that CrashPlan is making it sustainable?
  - 7y ago

probo23 7y ago

Is Blackblaze used mainly as a backup solution? Can anyone give me a use case?

jseutter 7y ago
Assuming you mean Backblaze and not Blackblaze.. I have data that is important to me (family photos, etc.) on my hard drive. I have a backups of that data running on a Raspberry Pi with an attached drive. If my house gets broken into, or burns down, or hit by a tornado, basically something Really Bad, Backblaze has a copy of my data offsite. It is tempting to use Backblaze as my only backup, but like they describe on their site, their primary value is as a backup of your backups. Normally you should never have to use them, and if you do, it will be slow. Now if you are in a hurry they offer a service to ship you your data on a thumb drive or hard drive, but that gives you an idea of their primary use.
- anchpop 7y ago
  Amusingly, blackblaze.com redirects to backblaze.com. I assume people have made that mistake before.
  - bluedino 7y ago
    Yes, they did and they even wrote a blog post about it: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-site/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-s...
    - atYevP 7y ago
      Yea, that was a fun "should we do this" conversation around the office...
atYevP 7y ago
Yev here from Backblaze -> the company started by providing unlimited online backup, and that's a great industry for us. About 4 years ago we released Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, which allows developers or sysadmins or enthusiasts to directly upload/retrieve data to/from our data centers. Our core competency is data storage - so while most folks do use us for a backup (either of their Mac or PC on the consumer side or servers/NAS devices with B2 Cloud storage) - what we really do is store and retrieve data.

nolok 7y ago

There was a post from BackBlaze a year (?) or so back where they commented on the Toshiba low failure rate with something along the lines of "they seem really reliable, but we buy in bulk and just don't have enough offers at low price for those, otherwise we would buy a lot of them". Well I run a couple dozen Synology NAS in professionnal setup, as well as two in personnal setup (mine and my parents'), and ever since that post I made the experiment of having almost 50% of all drives be Toshibas, and I have to say they do seem to be much more reliable (on the scale of "why do every other drive from Seagate and WD keep dying first, and often their replacement dies first too"). It is still a scale of use where it's mostly anecdotical rather than verifiable data, so don't take this fun comment for more than that. But I suspect a lot of people reading these posts are not interested for some large scale setup or anything like that but rather to know which drives to put in their home computer or NAS, and honestly I can highly recommend the Toshiba for that. They do tend to be a bit more expensive (around 10% more ? I buy them from ldlc.com and grosbill.com , french IT stores, no bulk buying or anything like that) Of course no matter the brand never expect no failure and a Toshiba drive may just as much die in the first ten minutes so always plan for it.

atYevP 7y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> Yea, the Toshiba drives are great! If the price was lower, they'd likely play a larger role in our hard drive mix!
- jl6 7y ago
  If they need replacing less often, then presumably you’d be willing to spend more on them, so do I infer that they are sufficiently more expensive to wipe out the benefits of greater reliability?
  - atYevP 7y ago
    Yev here -> Yes, that's basically the trade-off for us. Is the drive available and reliable vs. how much does it cost. One of the reasons we have so many Seagate drives is because they are available in abundance, are affordable for us, and have failure rates in-line with the other drives that we're testing.

kortilla 7y ago

Off-topic but sort of related: is there a hard drive tower designed specifically for a pool of SSDs? The one I have for 8 3.5 bays could easily fit twice as many of the little SSDs...

jaclaz 7y ago
You mean something like these? (not "tower" though) https://www.addonics.com/category/sda.php https://www.addonics.com/category/sda.php
myself248 7y ago
The term "mobile rack" will find some of the densest ways to shove, for instance, eight 2.5" drives into a single 5.25" bay. That can get you some serious density in one of those "cdrom duplicator" tower cases that's all drive-bays, but heaven help you on the controller side.

gwern 7y ago

> By increasing the shard integrity check rate, we potentially moved failures that were going to be found in the future into Q3. While discovering potential problems earlier is a good thing, it is possible that the hard drive failures recorded in Q3 could then be artificially high as future failures were dragged forward into the quarter. Given that our Annualized Failure Rate calculation is based on Drive Days and Drive Failures, potentially moving up some number of failures into Q3 could cause an artificial spike in the Q3 Annualized Failure Rates. This is what we will be monitoring over the coming quarters. Wouldn't survival analysis on interval-censored data handle this problem automatically? All of your observations of failure presumably are actually interval data, where all you know is that the drive failed sometime in between the last good check and the first bad check. Then it doesn't matter if some time periods have large intervals and others have small intervals, that just affects the precision of estimates.

kbutler 7y ago

I love these articles - I'd also love an update to the cost curves: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ (2017) It looks like after stalling in 2017-2018, $/GB has dropped again - https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm - but JCM doesn't have the large sample sizes Backblaze does.

roddux 7y ago

I've been following these since maybe 2016? I don't remember when they started. It's striking to note that for as long as I recall, HGST still holds the crown of lowest annualised failure rate across the board.

h1d 7y ago

The only reason I use other storage provider than backblaze is simply because of the benchmark done by one of the more modern backup tool author. https://github.com/gilbertchen/cloud-storage-comparison/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/gilbertchen/cloud-storage-comparison/blob... Can anyone from backblaze say anything about their performance compared to other vendors? The pricing is certainly ahead of others, so I would use if the performance is comparable to some of the leading group tested there.

atYevP 7y ago
Yev here -> well that chart hasn't been updated in a while. For starters we're just $0.01/GB for downloads (we dropped the price last year). Our performance is generally pretty good, and we're partnered with cloudflare (free egress) if you need more umph. But most of the time folks don't have any issues with just our regular service.

ksec 7y ago

I wonder If Backblaze will eventually offer some sort of consumer solution to Backup. An App on iOS, Android, Mac and Windows that simplifies backup to your Backblaze NAS, that Backup to B2 as well.