Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > I'd guess this is an effective piece of marketing. Yes, it really has been good to us. :-) It is data we would collect in

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > I'd guess this is an effective piece of marketing. Yes, it really has been good to us. :-) It is data we would collect internally for our own decision making and tracking even if we didn't release it, and it is only a small amount of work for us (mainly for Andy the author of that blog post) to format it up every 3 months and write some observations down. Since it isn't what we "sell", it would have just gone to waste being hidden. And it results in our name getting "out there" and inevitably every quarter somebody asks "hey, what do these people do that requires 130,000 hard drives anyway?" and then we get a little bump in customers. Cost vs. benefit has been WELL worth it to us. Along the way (unrelated to making money) it makes us happy that people get some use out of it. Like we find out somebody does their PhD thesis on the raw SMART numbers of the drives or something, we enjoy hearing about it. Until my dying day I will never understand why Google Storage and Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure don't release their drive failure statistics. I just don't get it. Those companies have SO MANY DRIVES and they employ people with PhDs in statistics, they MUST have the same info internally but at 100x the scale. I don't get why they don't release the numbers?! But hey, if they want to continue to give us this marketing gift of exclusivity, I'll take it. Maybe they like us and are just doing us a solid.