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Backblaze Hard Drive Stats
- emit_time 6y agoOh hey! It’s our favorite time of the quarter! :D
- robk 6y agoI don't see 2021 yet
- bscphil 6y agoYep, this is a repost. @dang this needs (2020) Edit: arguably the blog post was put up in 2021, but something to indicate that it's old news would be useful. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-for-2020/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-fo...
- atYevP 6y agoYev from Backblaze here -> stay tuned!
- andrewzah 6y agoAfter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26536019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26536019 I pulled off all my files from backblaze. Is there a good alternative for long term storage other than amazon glacier? For about ~6tb-8tb of data.
- fX0rObfoMN4 6y agoYou could use rsync.net or tarsnap but it wouldn't be cheap.
- woliveirajr 6y agoOVH, Wasabi.
- aikinai 6y agoI’m using Arq Backup with Wasabi for the storage. I think it’s a great combo.
- tsujp 6y agoHetzner has storage boxes and storage services. Not as cheap as Glacier of course. Otherwise there is Acronis, IDrive (nothing to do with Apple), and Carbonite. I've never dealt with the latter three only heard of them.
- foepys 6y agoIf you need the data, it could very well be cheaper. AWS Glacier request costs are no joke.
- andrewzah 6y agoWell, the idea with Backblaze/Glacier is cheap long term storage in exchange for high request costs, no? For me anyways, this is a tertiary backup of data that is duplicated in a zfs raid 10 pool and in external drives at a different house. A high request cost isn't much to get back my family photos, documents, etc, in a situation where neither of the first two backups are available.
- pnutjam 6y agoTime4vps had the best storage server prices last I checked. I've been using them for afew years.
- exhilaration 6y agoDid Backblaze ever issue an explanation for that?
- kbaker 6y agoWrite up here. Accidentally added the Facebook pixel to all pages instead of the marketing pages. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-party-tracking/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-party-tr...
- ethbr0 6y agoIf you want to nail a company to the cross for being in bed with Facebook... Backblaze probably shouldn't be at the top of your naughty list. IMHO, over-ado about a small something. "A new campaign was launched beginning on March 8, 2021 on the marketing web pages using Google Tag Manager which included the Facebook pixel. That new campaign resulted in the Facebook advertising pixel being accidentally configured in Google Tag Manager to run on all platform pages instead of just the marketing web pages." "We’ve confirmed that there was only a single page (b2_browse_files2.htm) where the Facebook advertising pixel had the ability to access certain metadata. We tested this on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Our investigation determined that 9,245 users visited that page during the window when the Facebook campaign was active (March 8 at 12:39 p.m. Pacific time, through March 21st at 11:19 p.m. Pacific time when we removed the offending code)." "If users were browsing their B2 Cloud Storage files on b2_browse_files2.htm during that period, AND clicked to preview file information, then the Facebook pixel pulled the following metadata: folder/file name, folder/file size, and the date the folder/file was uploaded. The folder/file metadata was limited to file information that was currently loaded in the browser. No actual files or file contents were shared at any time. The data that was pulled did not include any user account information."
- AnonC 6y agoIn previous threads about this leak, commenters gave examples of how exposing filenames could be harmful to certain classes of paying customers. It is not a small thing by any stretch of imagination.
- alberth 6y agoIsn’t this a bit hasty. Backblaze fixed thr issue immediately, wrote a detailed blog posted and it was also found to have only been in a single webpage of theirs. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-party-tracking/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-party-tr... Now while I certainly agree that I don’t like this info leaked, there was no mal-intent and they quickly took action once notified. I feel like their action is what makes me like them so much.
- dannyw 6y agoYes and no. This issue was perhaps X lines of code away from accidentally transferring the contents of your files (or login email and password!) to Facebook, or a malicious attacker. For one, this highlights they don't have automated tests detecting arbitrary/malicious JS injection on their web app. This is a serious security risk: we are talking about your cloud filesystem here, and "spear phish / bribe your marketing intern to adding malicious.js" is a real attack vector. Alarms should be going off internally whenever a new external JS file gets included in your webapp, either ststically or dynamically. Facebook pixel today, a malicious hacker tomorrow. I'd expect a private cloud to have better security procedures than "wait till someone on Twitter discovers a bug". (Personally, I will continue to use Backblaze, but just highlighting why it's a serious security concern.)
- jscheel 6y agoYou should not be backing up plaintext passwords to offsite storage anywhere. Or do you mean malicious JS capturing your form entry at login?
- dannyw 6y agoThat's what I mean. But the specific issue I see is that a piece of external JS got inserted into their web app, and their security team didn't realise it. The fact that its from GTM is no excuse: give me Google tag manager, I'll exfil your users data in an hour ;)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- purplecats 6y agoI just spent the last 12 hours migrating everything to B2. BB seems to be somewhat immature relative to the competitors, and the product certainly feels that way, but as long as they try and the data integrity is there, then I think I am okay with it. The rest of my stuff is in S3 with Glacier auto archives.
- poidos 6y agomaybe rsync.net? I don’t use them (yet) but they seem cool.
- andrewzah 6y agoI looked at rsync.net, but they are 2.5 cents/gb versus backblaze's $0.005/gb or glacier's $0.004/gb per month. I see rsync.net for active use, while b2/glacier are for set-and-forget backups.
- icedchai 6y agoI use Wasabi with restic. Wasabi has an S3 compatible API, I believe.
- devwastaken 6y agoThat's a good example of the paraphrased quote "don't make software for privacy people, they'll never be happy". They fixed it, yet every other service is doing far worse behavior. Dont hold backblaze on a higher pedestal than amazon unless you only want amazon to exist. Backblaze is the most affordable and available remote storage/cdn service available, by miles. Go look at a calculator between amazon and backblaze. The actually give half a care and even partner with various providers so your outgoing bandwidth is free to them.
- tzs 6y agoFor a large number of Windows and Mac users who have less than 1 TB to backup (or less than 6 TB if they are willing to put up with a fair amount of hassle) there is a far less expensive option. I speak of Windows and Mac users who got a Microsoft 365 subscription for the Microsoft Office apps. That comes with 1 TB of OneDrive, or 6 TB if you get the family subscription. OneDrive has API access which is supported by a fair number of commercial and open source backup programs. You can get a family subscription without being a family. All you actually need is the ability to control 5 extra email addresses, one for each fake family member. Your 6 TB would end up partitioned into 6 1 TB buckets so as I said, would be somewhat of a hassle to use. But if you only need 1 TB, and want or need Office anyway, and don't really have a lot of non-backup cloud needs, then OneDrive is a good, often overlooked option.
- andrewzah 6y agoWhat bothers me is using facebook tracking scripts in the first page, particularly for internal customer pages. Of course I'm not happy with them working with facebook at all. Other services doing worse things is not an excuse. I don't want to go with amazon either, hence my question here.
- risyachka 6y agoVast majority of websites integrate facebook or google or both their SDKs. But they don't work with them. They have to it in order to run ads and as result to survive.
- 6y ago
- sandworm101 6y agoConsidering that Backblaze was totally open and correcte this mistake immediately, what you are asking for is a backup company that never makes mistakes. They dont exist. Buy a synology NAS. Slap some ironwolfs in it and do your own backups.
- dylan604 6y agoHow many years at $60/year of Backblaze service will it take to equal that NAS setup? Also, will that NAS survive a disaster? These are the types of questions that make the Backblaze services so hard to walk away.
- ideaoverload 6y agoGoogle archive option looks pretty good with 1.2$/TB/month and real time API: https://cloud.google.com/storage/archival https://cloud.google.com/storage/archival
- red0point 6y agoYes, until you actually want to download your data and pay 85 USD for downloading it once.
- domq 5y agoCan you please substantiate that point?
- charrondev 6y agoWe’re so pissed at Google Tag Manager being included in a page of a website in error, that we’ll move our backups to a google service (that with certainty will track analytics at google indefinitely).
- risyachka 6y agoIf you are concerned about tracking this should be your last choice.
- notyourday 6y agoWhy would you use any cloud storage company without encrypting your files? I use Backblaze and Wasabi.
- amelius 6y agoI wonder, isn't tape backup ripe for disruption? The drives are crazy expensive, while tapes are very affordable.
- mcdevilkiller 6y agoTape is also incredibly slow and difficult to scale. Also, the equipment needed to operate a cluster of tape archivers costs a lot, while they are using their own designs dor servers, with coXmmodity hardware in them.
- cm2187 6y agoAnd to backup a NAS, it requires to regularly change the tapes. Any backup that requires manual steps is likely to be delayed and to be too infrequent to be useful.
- adrian_b 6y agoTape is slow only when you need frequently to read some random part of it, because you might need a couple of minutes to go till the other end of the tape. The reading/writing speed of tapes is excellent, better than that of hard drives, so writing a backup takes less time. For archives that are accessed only infrequently, tape is more reliable and also faster. If you want to have access in less than a minute to any part of your backups, then yes, tape is inappropriate and you must use HDDs.
- amelius 6y ago> Tape is also incredibly slow and difficult to scale Tape is still the best backup medium for many small and large companies. And by the way, how fast do you think a service like Backblaze is?
- varispeed 6y agoI initially wanted to pull all my data, but then realised that I in fact encrypt everything locally so what they see is just garbage, so in my case if the provider is unsafe and leaks all my data, that would be of no use to anyone.
- wnevets 6y agoTim Apple could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot someone but HN would still use their products. Backblaze accidentally deploys a facebook pixel to its pages and HN cast it off to the tech shadow realm.
- yosito 6y agoTardigrade.io
- neogodless 6y agoI've seen Backblaze Hard Drive Stat articles in the past, and they were a lot longer and had a lot of tables breaking things down by manufacturer. This has one chart and a lot of links, but the newest one is from January. So what is being shared here that's new?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fivesixzero 6y agoThis looks like a shift away from their old “editorialized” blog-style updates to a data-sharing-centric approach. I’m guessing that this takes less time for them and it allows various commentators and communities to create their own opinions based on the data. I liked the tone and approach of their old blog posts but this is pretty cool too. It’s just good to see them continuing to share their data since it’s arguably relevant to a wide range of audiences.
- rincebrain 6y agoThis doesn't appear to be a shift, to me? It's just the central landing page that Backblaze has had all of their HDD stats and blogposts linked from for years now[1]. [1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20190707132216/https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190707132216/https://www.backb...
- magicalhippo 6y agoJust added a couple of MG07ACA14TA's to my NAS, as one of the two 8TB WD Reds I had started to fail after just 3 years of on time. They're massive beasts, with 9 platters and 18 heads, but enabling acoustics and power saving really helped on the seeking noise level. Not sure how much of a performance hit that leads to though, haven't had time to fully investigate. They run significantly cooler than the 8TB Reds tho, from ~45C down to ~30C in the same bays.
- bscphil 6y ago> but enabling acoustics and power saving really helped on the seeking noise level. Do you know what's the approximate power draw (in Watts) of each drive with these settings enabled? I'd like to move to a lower power system sometime in the next year, but I'll also need to add some more drives. Power is extremely expensive where I live. I wonder if the power saving features reduce the drive lifetimes (because of quicker spindowns)... might not be a good idea for an always on NAS.
- magicalhippo 6y ago> Do you know what's the approximate power draw (in Watts) of each drive with these settings enabled? I do not, but I could find out as I have a external SATA to USB adapter with separate 12V power. Check back in a day or so. > I wonder if the power saving features reduce the drive lifetimes (because of quicker spindowns) Ah, I enabled max power-saving without spindown. Most of my earlier HD failures, including a couple of WD Greens, taught me to avoid spinning down.
- magicalhippo 6y agoSo I just recalled I had a DC-capable clamp meter, and I was able to isolate the disk on the last stretch of a power connector chain. I tried running with both the power management set to "Level 128 - Minimum power usage without Standby (no spindown)" and Acoustics Managment to "Maximum", as well as "Disabled" for both. Didn't make a noticeable difference on power draw, at most 0.1A more during writes, primarily just noise. Idle 5V 0.27A 12V 0.40A Write 5V 0.53A 12V 0.50A So that's just over 6W idle and 8.7W under load. I'm surprised about the high idle draw, both due to being significantly higher than the specs[1] and due to them running so cool. Did they spin down the disks to get the 4W figure perhaps? I did check my clamp meter against my electronic load and it reads pretty accurate. I didn't manage to test reads properly, since the disks are part of a ZFS pool and it spreads the reads all over, along with aggressive caching. [1]: https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/us/storage/product/data-center-enterprise/cloud-scale-capacity/articles/mg07acaxxx.html https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/us/storage/product/data-...
- purplecats 6y ago.
- garaetjjte 6y agoThey do use erasure coding: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...
- Denvercoder9 6y ago> BB doesn't have redundancy, right? No, they do have redundancy.
- brianzelip 6y agoOff topic but related - a great podcast episode with the author of Restic, an open source backup system (that can connect to online services like Backblaze). https://changelog.com/podcast/434 https://changelog.com/podcast/434
- wdb 6y agoI am avoiding Blackblaze as they don't allow you to do due diligence. Any requests to get security audit reports, pentest reports under NDA are all ignored. If anyone know if they are available through their website I am looking forward hearing it.
- notyourday 6y ago> I am avoiding Blackblaze as they don't allow you to do due diligence. Any requests to get security audit reports, pentest reports under NDA are all ignored. What they should do is make you cut a half a million dollar check, refundable when you spend half a million dollars on services. It removes so many headaches from dealing with people who think their $100 over a year is Very Big Money.
- wdb 6y agoI don't understand why it matters if I only spend $100 or half million? If I am going to use third party I want to verify it meets my own security requirements. I think that's totally reasonable to ask. Actually I would expect that such a big company have these things readily available on request.
- notyourday 6y agoBecause in the vast majority of the cases those that want these docs after getting a generic one start asking questions/want interaction while having the attitude that "Why should it matter if I only spend $100?" thus expending way more company resources than their account is worth.
- wdb 6y agoYou make it sound like reviewing these documents is free. If a company ask me for similar paperwork (which they have) I have the paperwork in order and ready, they sign a NDA and I am sending them. It's just a step in the sales process imho
- cyberlab 6y agoI always wondered: what happens to customer data when these drives fail? I would imagine they would be using fault tolerant systems like RAID of ZFS to mitigate. I admire their transparency in the usual style of: 'We're a backup company, look how many drives we have failing!'
- mcdevilkiller 6y agoYou can read on their blog. They use custom software with Reed-Solomon* erasure coding, similar to RAID but distributed between different disks, servers and racks. Their EC library is on Github (Java). The most enjoyable posts are the ones describing how they built their pods and architecture.
- gsruff 6y agoTheir systems are fault tolerant... I found more information on their storage architecture here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect... [edited to sound less snarky]
- m4rtink 6y agoI guess the could encrypt the data that ends up on the platters so that it would look like random noise to any attacker recovering the platters from a broken drive that was not physically destroyed? Of course that has both performance and data corruption scenarios that one needs to take into account.
- andrewmunsell 6y agoI have some ~50 TB total in a NAS, all WD drives. I bought some 3 & 4 TB WD Red drives around 2014, and they have all been going 24/7 with absolutely no problems at all. I recently needed to expand (to the point I am at now) and bought & shucked 14 TB WDs, so I'm curious to see whether there will be any long term difference in terms of reliability between the "official" red drives and the shucked whitelabel drives.
- nicolaslem 6y agoShucked drives are very often SMR so caveat emptor.
- MrFoof 6y agoSMR is very dependent on capacity and SKUs. The vast majority of SMR hard disks are 6TB capacities and below, and I'm only aware on one 8TB Seagate SKU that is SMR. Though I'm aware HGST shipped a 20TB SMR drive late in 2020. NAS Compares has a fairly good starting list of drives and whether or not they are CMR or SMR, though there may be more exhaustive lists out there: https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/ https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-d... -- ----- In general, check the R/N of shucked white-label drives, and you should be able to quickly find a corresponding datasheet (hundreds of pages) from the manufacturer. For example, some 16TB WD Elements I'm in the process of testing after shucking are R/N US7SAR160, which are 16TB HGST Ultrastar DC HC550. These are SATA 6Gbps 7200rpm helium-filled CMR drives with 512MB of cache.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoSMR = shingled magnetic recording; comparison to conventional/perpendicular magnetic recording: https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/PMR_SMR_hard_disk_drives https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutoria...
- andrewmunsell 6y agoI did verify the ones I bought are not SMR, that was a requirement before I bought them in the first place.
- terafo 6y agoWhat happened in Q1 2020? Almost 2x drop in failure rates is quite substantial.