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I'm thankful for these reports as well, despite them being trailing edge/etc. For a while they mirrored some problems we were having at work with a particular v

I'm thankful for these reports as well, despite them being trailing edge/etc. For a while they mirrored some problems we were having at work with a particular vendor (and helped to justify switching products a year or two into the nightmare). What I really wish is that they would make an effort to go beyond just reporting their experiences and see what they are doing as also providing a service in the form of model reliability data. AKA toss a few pods of WD's/etc in there even if they are slightly more expensive/whatever. If the data were broken out by production location and manufacture date, its likely it would be something that they could sell on the open market for a small fee. I know I would have gotten the company I worked for to pay such a fee for a somewhat scientific look at the failure rates of certain models/etc. AKA, pay a bit more for a broader set of drives, summarize the data for free, and then get people to pay for the detail data. If you work for a company buying a thousand or so drives a year, avoiding a 10% AFR is going to be worth a lot of money. AKA too small to have a good view of the state of things, but big enough that buying 1k bad drives and fighting daily RAID rebuilds for the next three years is real nightmare. Think of it as a bit of insurance, or at least validation of a problem when things start to go south.

brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > AKA toss a few pods of WD's/etc in there even if they are slightly more expensive/whatever. If you see "low numbers" of one particular drive model in the stats, that is usually us trying out that drive model because at some point in the future the price might drop making it worth purchasing it in bulk worth it, or the price is ALREADY worth it but we're being careful in the rollout to make sure that drive model performs in our particular application - nobody else's application, just for us. > make an effort to go beyond just reporting their experiences We are VERY careful to report what we are seeing in our datacenter for our particular application, and no more. This isn't a scientific study, we aren't Consumer Reports, we're just publishing data we would collect whether or not we released it. We have a core business we super happy focusing on, somebody else is WELCOME to sell drive testing and drive predictions and we won't compete with them or get in their way. Heck, we would totally subscribe to that service!

brianwski 6y ago

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > AKA toss a few pods of WD's/etc in there even if they are slightly more expensive/whatever. If you see "low numbers" of one particular drive model in the stats, that is usually us trying out that drive model because at some point in the future the price might drop making it worth purchasing it in bulk worth it, or the price is ALREADY worth it but we're being careful in the rollout to make sure that drive model performs in our particular application - nobody else's application, just for us. > make an effort to go beyond just reporting their experiences We are VERY careful to report what we are seeing in our datacenter for our particular application, and no more. This isn't a scientific study, we aren't Consumer Reports, we're just publishing data we would collect whether or not we released it. We have a core business we super happy focusing on, somebody else is WELCOME to sell drive testing and drive predictions and we won't compete with them or get in their way. Heck, we would totally subscribe to that service!