5 ms·

Backblaze Drive Stats for Q2 2021

97 points by LaSombra 5y ago

lapp0 5y ago
Bleep bloop I am a robot bleep
bufferoverflow 5y ago
As usual, HGST and WDC are great. Seagate - to be avoided.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  1% annual failure rates don't seem that bad to me. Historically, drive failures were closer to 5%. The 14TB Seagates with 5% failure are explained as follows: > The 14TB Seagate (ST14000NM0138) drives have an AFR of 5.55% for Q2 2021. These Seagate drives along with 14TB Toshiba drives (MG07ACA14TEY) were installed in Dell storage servers deployed in our U.S. West region about six months ago. We are actively working with Dell to determine the root cause of this elevated failure rate and expect to follow up on this topic in the next quarterly drive stats report. It seems like a "Bathtub curve" issue. The Seagates have very low months of use, but have failed at high numbers. It could be that Dell messed up the quality control. Or maybe it is Seagate.
  - citrin_ru 5y ago
    It is known that HDD are negatively affected by vibration, so one of possible causes is that used for Seagate chassis are bad at dumping vibration from HDDs or chassis fans cause a vibration.
- arpa 5y ago
  WDC is not that great, they lied on SMART data about RPMs, and you had to do audio test to determine drive speed. SMR fiasco is also fresh.
ksec 5y ago
HGST is still the best. But looking at this data doesn't actually give me confidence, it makes me even more paranoid about my Data. We still dont have some cheap Data Storage that last for a life time. My friend were showing me photos of her daughter from 10 years ago and most of them had it "backup" on a DVD. I couldn't quite bring myself to explain to her about DVD life time.
- arpa 5y ago
  I think hard disk drives, tapes and cds have a pretty good offline life, and should last a lifetime if you, like me, are not planning on surviving to advanced age.
  - ksec 5y ago
    CDs and DVD degrade over time, I think this is primarily those with home recording CD / DVD-Rs. I am not sure what the difference is with Factory made CDs or DVDs like Music CD or DVD from Playstation 2 but those seems to be fine. I think I need to look this up that you have brought it to my attention. But do HDD last longer if they are unplugged. And only start up when they are needed? In that case wouldn't an NAS putting HDD to sleep most of the time would prolong the life time of HDD?
    - bitminer 5y ago
      Be very aware -- SSD must be plugged in otherwise they may lose data after a few years. The time varies with temperature. Search for SSD data retention for more info. The JEDEC standard is the one to read.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
  - ksec 5y ago
    Oh Thank You. I will look into it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nja 5y ago
I love Backblaze for their drive stats posts, but has anyone else run into multiple annoyances with their main services? FWIW I am a mostly-happy customer for multiple years, and I always seem to be able to find files that I am looking for in my backups. However, I've run into the following issues on _multiple Windows PCs_: - `bzfilelist.exe` takes up 100% disk constantly on my SSD. I have to kill it anytime I want to do anything remotely disk-intensive (such as running a game or editing video). Not sure if this is a workaround to avoid having to watch the filesystem, but it is an annoyance. Changing the process priority can help in some cases, but usually I have to kill it to get acceptable performance in other applications. Also not sure if this is good for the SSD's health. - Certain folders are hardcoded to be excluded. Standard folders such as `C:/Windows` make sense, but it also hardcodes excluding _all of program files_. This means that Steam game files are not automatically backed up (yes, this is not an ideal spot for Steam to store files, but it's how it has done it for a long, long time). I had to hack together a powershell script that periodically copies my files to another drive so they can be backed up by Backblaze. "Automatic backups" eh? - Despite the above, it _does_ automatically back up Chrome's temporary files, which means a ton of churn as I browse throughout the day. I can manually exclude a path, but if they're going to be draconian about hardcoding paths to not back up, why not hardcode Chrome's app data too? In addition, I have played around with their B2 service, an "S3-compatible" offering, and run into issues there as well: - The S3-compatible hosting is not at parity with S3. There is no index.html autodetection, so I had to hack together an nginx proxy to assume `index.html` files at directories. - The S3-compatible web hosting is extremely slow. It's a common pattern to want to host a periodically-updated static site out of an S3 bucket, but I have found the speed to be insufficient for even basic HTML in B2. - I was unable to get their provided tooling for backing up local files to B2 working on a local Raspberry Pi. I ended up rsyncing to a different service. Am I the only one with these problems?
- quaffapint 5y ago
  I haven't tried hosting things in B2 - But I've been backing up to B2 via Duplicati and it has yet to have a single hiccup and the pricing is great. I have around 190G on there updated every night and I pay around $0.90/month - truly less than a cup of coffee.
- 5y ago

97 points by LaSombra 5y ago

lapp0 5y ago

Bleep bloop I am a robot bleep

bufferoverflow 5y ago

As usual, HGST and WDC are great. Seagate - to be avoided.

dragontamer 5y ago
1% annual failure rates don't seem that bad to me. Historically, drive failures were closer to 5%. The 14TB Seagates with 5% failure are explained as follows: > The 14TB Seagate (ST14000NM0138) drives have an AFR of 5.55% for Q2 2021. These Seagate drives along with 14TB Toshiba drives (MG07ACA14TEY) were installed in Dell storage servers deployed in our U.S. West region about six months ago. We are actively working with Dell to determine the root cause of this elevated failure rate and expect to follow up on this topic in the next quarterly drive stats report. It seems like a "Bathtub curve" issue. The Seagates have very low months of use, but have failed at high numbers. It could be that Dell messed up the quality control. Or maybe it is Seagate.
- citrin_ru 5y ago
  It is known that HDD are negatively affected by vibration, so one of possible causes is that used for Seagate chassis are bad at dumping vibration from HDDs or chassis fans cause a vibration.
arpa 5y ago
WDC is not that great, they lied on SMART data about RPMs, and you had to do audio test to determine drive speed. SMR fiasco is also fresh.

ksec 5y ago

HGST is still the best. But looking at this data doesn't actually give me confidence, it makes me even more paranoid about my Data. We still dont have some cheap Data Storage that last for a life time. My friend were showing me photos of her daughter from 10 years ago and most of them had it "backup" on a DVD. I couldn't quite bring myself to explain to her about DVD life time.

arpa 5y ago
I think hard disk drives, tapes and cds have a pretty good offline life, and should last a lifetime if you, like me, are not planning on surviving to advanced age.
- ksec 5y ago
  CDs and DVD degrade over time, I think this is primarily those with home recording CD / DVD-Rs. I am not sure what the difference is with Factory made CDs or DVDs like Music CD or DVD from Playstation 2 but those seems to be fine. I think I need to look this up that you have brought it to my attention. But do HDD last longer if they are unplugged. And only start up when they are needed? In that case wouldn't an NAS putting HDD to sleep most of the time would prolong the life time of HDD?
  - bitminer 5y ago
    Be very aware -- SSD must be plugged in otherwise they may lose data after a few years. The time varies with temperature. Search for SSD data retention for more info. The JEDEC standard is the one to read.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- ksec 5y ago
  Oh Thank You. I will look into it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nja 5y ago

I love Backblaze for their drive stats posts, but has anyone else run into multiple annoyances with their main services? FWIW I am a mostly-happy customer for multiple years, and I always seem to be able to find files that I am looking for in my backups. However, I've run into the following issues on _multiple Windows PCs_: - `bzfilelist.exe` takes up 100% disk constantly on my SSD. I have to kill it anytime I want to do anything remotely disk-intensive (such as running a game or editing video). Not sure if this is a workaround to avoid having to watch the filesystem, but it is an annoyance. Changing the process priority can help in some cases, but usually I have to kill it to get acceptable performance in other applications. Also not sure if this is good for the SSD's health. - Certain folders are hardcoded to be excluded. Standard folders such as `C:/Windows` make sense, but it also hardcodes excluding _all of program files_. This means that Steam game files are not automatically backed up (yes, this is not an ideal spot for Steam to store files, but it's how it has done it for a long, long time). I had to hack together a powershell script that periodically copies my files to another drive so they can be backed up by Backblaze. "Automatic backups" eh? - Despite the above, it _does_ automatically back up Chrome's temporary files, which means a ton of churn as I browse throughout the day. I can manually exclude a path, but if they're going to be draconian about hardcoding paths to not back up, why not hardcode Chrome's app data too? In addition, I have played around with their B2 service, an "S3-compatible" offering, and run into issues there as well: - The S3-compatible hosting is not at parity with S3. There is no index.html autodetection, so I had to hack together an nginx proxy to assume `index.html` files at directories. - The S3-compatible web hosting is extremely slow. It's a common pattern to want to host a periodically-updated static site out of an S3 bucket, but I have found the speed to be insufficient for even basic HTML in B2. - I was unable to get their provided tooling for backing up local files to B2 working on a local Raspberry Pi. I ended up rsyncing to a different service. Am I the only one with these problems?

quaffapint 5y ago
I haven't tried hosting things in B2 - But I've been backing up to B2 via Duplicati and it has yet to have a single hiccup and the pricing is great. I have around 190G on there updated every night and I pay around $0.90/month - truly less than a cup of coffee.
5y ago