35 ms·

Backblaze Drive Stats for 2022

207 points by TangerineDream 4y ago

Hamuko 4y ago
I'll never be able to understand how Seagate manages to make so many failing hard drives. A 5.7% failure rate with an average age of 2 years? The only one that comes close is the 5.3% HGST with over twice the average age and overall low sample size. Out of the many hard drives that I've owned in my life, the only ones to die on me have both been Seagates, with the first one being the infamous ST3000DM001, a hard drive so shit it has its own Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001).
- pooloo 4y ago
  They also have a drive on that list that has an Avg Age of 92 months, also they have significantly more Seagate drives compared to the rest. Additionally, most of these drives are consumer drives which are not intended to be ran at 100% for months on end.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    having high failure rates despite having lots of drives is actually worse - there is the chance the HGST failures are just random chance due to small numbers of drives. But this possibility does not exist for Seagate with much larger statistical samples. AFAIK there hasn't been much of a difference shown between consumer workloads and enterprise workloads for HDD lifespan either, it's just cope and theorycrafting from people who are emotionally attached to the idea of Seagate not being shit for some reason. No other drives seem to have such problems with being used in this fashion: what is your theory for why Seagate drives are uniquely affected by being in the pods in some fashion that would not also affect WD drives or HGST drives or whoever else? Are WD drives not affected by vibration for some reason? For a while Seagate Deniers latched onto the first-gen pods as maybe being the answer but they're all long gone at this point, this failure-rate anomaly is continuing even in the newer pods. The only reasonable possibility would be that Seagate drives are simply constructed in an entirely different, less resilient fashion, which (a) is not factually supported in any way afaik, and (b) would still be very relevant for consumers to know! It's not like a home PC is vibration-free either after all. There comes a point when it's not "steelmanning" it's just denial of reality in the face of consistent evidence. Like you're not "steelmanning" climate change you're just a denier. The data has pretty consistently showed the same thing for 10+ years. It's not a "random sampling bias" that uniformly affects everyone except Seagate in the exact same way almost every single survey, it's not some magical factor that makes Seagate drives uniquely unsuited to storage-array usage but magically resilient when used in a home PC, it's not first-gen backblaze pods being bad, it's just Seagate putting out shitty drives, period the end. All these extremely complex theories to get around the very simple conclusion that Seagate has shitty parts or shitty QC and the failure rates are slightly higher as a result. A lot of the Seagate models are relatively OK, but almost all of the "outlier" drives with really high failure rates are Seagate. It is the old bayesian probability thing: get rid of Seagate and you've gotten rid of almost all of the models with high failure rates. edit: sorry Samsung on the brain since they have another wave of SSD failures too /laugh
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  Either you're lucky or you just have not had that many drives around... The first to fail was a Miniscribe 5¼" 20MB, it died after a week. I replaced it with a 3½" Seagate connected to an Adaptec RLL controller - this being before IDE was a thing the controller decided the encoding scheme and RLL gave you 50% extra storage space. This Seagate never died on me, I probably have it around somewhere still. Then came the Western Digital IDE drives, two of those died and took ~250MB of data with them to data heaven. They were followed by another WD, this one 1.2GB - it died. When I built a system around the famous Abit BP-6 motherboard I put in two Maxtor drives - which I should not have done, one of them died within 2 years. Meanwhile I'd helped my father get a new drive, one of those fancy IBM Deskstars. Within a year it had turned itself into a Deathstar like most of its brethren seem to have done. Then there was the 10 GB Travelstar which died, then the 20GB Travelstar which also died - but survived the canoe expedition over the Yukon safely tucked away into the water- and probably bulletproof solar-powered Virgin Webplayer I had made to document the 3½ month trip - and the 20GB Toshiba. The 2TB WD Green, dead. One of the 1TB WD Greens, dead - but its mate still running strong at a 120.000+ running hours with its 2TB brand mates coming in second at 100.000+ hours. In the DS4243 array I have replaced 5 15K 600GB drives, good that these were cheap as dirt (but take quite a bit of power to run, hence the low price). Notice that I have not had a Seagate drive die on me yet. There are a few in an array somewhere here but those still do their job even though they're quite old by now. Maybe I'm just lucky in that I never bought any of the failing types since these problems seem to be related to specific types.
controversial97 4y ago
Backblaze has stated in a blog post that they purchase drives in large quantities direct from manufacturers and negotiate for good prices. Backblaze says that a model of drive which is significantly cheaper and somewhat less reliable can be ok for them. This means that these stats may not be a very meaningful indication when purchasing a few drives from a retailer. Never the less, the world is full of situations where you have to make choices with insufficient data. I'm still going to prefer to avoid Seagate hard drives where practical.
- metadat 4y ago
  100% with you. Seagate is the manufacturer with drives that fail at 10x the rate of the competition. I'll avoid, because drive failures are annoying.
- tjoff 4y ago
  The implication being that they might knowingly buy a subpar batch or that a manufacturer would offer rebates for a subpar batch, or what?
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    Not sure if that's what OP meant, but it could be that they get better batches from manufacturers, while retail gets the rest? The other way you could read the comment would be that the stats don't mean much since Backblaze can tolerate higher defect rates if they negotiate a low enough price. But to me, that doesn't make sense since it wouldn't affect the failure rate statistics at all anyway.
  - Macha 4y ago
    If drive A has a 3% failure/year rate and drive B a 1% failure/year rate, but you can get 12 of drive A for the price of 10 drive B and you're going to have stock on hand to replace drives anyway and you're confidant in your backup strategy then for a business it may still make sense to buy drive A. As a consumer, you're unlikely to keep an in-box spare, so even if you have a good backup system, a drive failure is still going to be an inconvenience, and leave you without redundancy until your replacement is shipped to you, so you might pay 20% more for drive A.
DavidD 4y ago
I have a theory that solar flares are the cause of some hard drive failures would be interesting to see if a few lead shielded cases would reduce the number of failures. I used to manage a large fleet of computers and anytime we got radio interference from solar flares we would have 3-5 hard drive failures that day.
- lazide 4y ago
  Out of what fleet size?
  - DavidD 4y ago
    Around a 1000
- rom-antics 4y ago
  What were the failure modes? Was it corrupted data or were the drives permanently fried?
  - DavidD 4y ago
    Corrupt data that would compromise the Operating systems, these were Dell computers with multiple different branded hard drives they would have us run their hardware diagnostic tool that would put them in the range to receive a free replacements. We didn't have to send back the old ones under the contract we had with them they would still work when reformatted but were less reliable after that.
    - GTP 4y ago
      So far I always assumed that, when talking about HDDs failing rates, they where considering the typical mechanical failure. I never considered that they could declare a failure due to some corrupted data, although it would be reasonable for a datacenter to do so.
      - DavidD 4y ago
bluedino 4y ago
I wonder what the numbers need to look like to replace the remaining 4TB pods with 16TB pods.
- atYevP 4y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> That's a factor of time and power! The 16TB drives consume more power so that's part of the calculation when we swap from the 4TBs, but we are monitoring them b/c we certainly want to avoid cluster failures and have what we call "rolling migration" projects going on all the time where we perpetually migration hard drives and hardware based on durability projections, power balancing, physical capacity, etc...
RDaneel0livaw 4y ago
Looks like HGST continues to rule the pack, similar to prior years. Though, I thought the entire brand of HGST was set to be discontinued and Western Digital just taking over all naming / marketing / etc... I even see when I search for "ultrastar" or similar, it's all currently branded Western Digital. Does backblaze get some special enterprise gear?
- andrewmunsell 4y ago
  I tend to buy my HDDs from Provantage now-a-days. I've never bought an HGST drive (I have a combo of WD and Toshiba drives), but the HGST branding seems more prominent at Provantage (https://www.provantage.com/hgst-0f30146~7HGST0H9.htm https://www.provantage.com/hgst-0f30146~7HGST0H9.htm) versus elsewhere (ex. Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Ultrastar-HUH721212ALE600-3-5-Inch-Internal/dp/B07PF1TVND https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Ultrastar-HUH721212ALE600-3-5-In..., though I'd never buy an HDD from Amazon today due to their shipping issues)
  - dspillett 4y ago
    > though I'd never buy an HDD from Amazon today due to their shipping issues I'm wary of Amazon due to co-mingling issues. I can't be sure I'm not getting something incorrectly packaged/labelled by another seller so I get a reconditioned (or simply counterfeit) unit instead of a new one.
- numpad0 4y ago
  I'm a total consumer in this topic, but I believe WD tried to and externally communicated that to be the plan, and drives are marked as such, but due to antitrust rulings(?) HGST remains somewhat independent and the heritages remain somewhat separate to each others. Also, there seems to be just handful of "actual" drive models in HDD market - they seem to be swapped Ladas and VW Beetles. Perhaps that makes calling them in old names make sense.
- segfaultbuserr 4y ago
  Some (all?) rebranded "WD Ultrastar" drives still report themselves as "HGST" as their SMART device models. I'm not sure how does Blackblaze count them. Perhaps they're (correctly) counted via the SMART model regardless of branding? Update: This issue has been covered in the Blackblaze 2020 report. They apparently existed in parallel. The original HGST drives, while still existed as of 2020, were being gradually phased out... > These drives obviously share their lineage with the HGST drives, but they report their manufacturer as WDC versus HGST. The model numbers are similar with the first three characters changing from HUH to WUH and the last three characters changing from 604, for example, to 6L4. We don’t know the significance of that change, perhaps it is the factory location, a firmware version, or some other designation. If you know, let everyone know in the comments. As with all of the major drive manufacturers, the model number carries patterned information relating to each drive model and is not randomly generated, so the 6L4 string would appear to mean something useful.
ck2 4y ago
I don't trust any of these helium filled drives to last more than a decade. Helium atom is too small and leaks through everything, eventually. Really hope I am proven wrong. Unfortunately what backblaze is excellently documenting is not archival use. I've got half TB and 1TB WDC drives that are over a decade old and still spin up fine, single platter and run cool and quiet even air filled. I think 4TB is the cutoff for air-filled but not sure anymore.
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  Many 8 TB and even up some 12 TB I believe don't have helium. It depends on the model and manufacturer, so you have to dig into the spec sheets to figure it out.
- dannyw 4y ago
  There are helium sensors in the drives. It's reported via SMART. It's monitorable.
  - TwoNineFive 4y ago
    Just a note that there are no direct helium sensors in these drives. The status is inferred indirectly through some thermal sensors, conductivity, or something similar. I've read that the readings of the helium value are not very good and that it only puts out readings with granularity steps of 10-20% each. It's not great.
- tzs 4y ago
  > Helium atom is too small and leaks through everything, eventually. Suppose the drive were encased in solid hydrogen? Hydrogen freezes at 14 K and helium boils at 4 K so there's a 10 K range where you could have both solid hydrogen and gaseous helium. Hydrogen atoms are bigger than helium atoms, but what matters is the gaps between the hydrogen in the solid. I was unable with a bit of Googling to find out anything about the physical structure of solid hydrogen.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  I don't trust any spinning rust for a decade, but I suppose a pre-helium model stored in good, stable conditions should still spin up in a decade.
2c2c2c 4y ago
Anyone have experience using their s3 drop in replacement at scale?
- dylan604 4y ago
  My only experience was moving data from a b2 to an s3. While there were some inefficiencies with the workflow, it went as well as could be hoped for when cross chatting between cloud vendors. Installing their linux app was out of bounds of normal procedures, but it be what it b2 <hangsHeadInShame>
- james_in_the_uk 4y ago
  b2 or not b2, is that the question?
- hedora 4y ago
  I have single digit TB in it, and my synology HyperBackups fail extremely infrequently. (I'm not willing to attribute the failures to their S3 implementation, since our ISP kind of sucks.) Anyway, I haven't seen any apparent data loss over the last few years. I'm considering doing a full restore, just for the heck of it. (Especially since this article convinced me I should start replacing the aging drives in my NAS!)
  - a10c 4y ago
    HyperBackup is extremely disappointing. At no point has it risen above 1MB/s when backing up to S3 (Backblaze) when other methods routinely saturate my upload (40Mb/s)
jms703 4y ago
If you're struggling to pick a drive, maybe the best approach is to find a drive that meets your needs from a maker that has a solid warranty program. With a good backup strategy, the maker of the drive may not matter as much.
alexfoo 4y ago
For those that are wondering, 2,699,664 TiB (~2700PiB or ~2.7EiB). (I've assumed TiB over TB given they are the sizes reported by the drive manufacturer.)

I'll never be able to understand how Seagate manages to make so many failing hard drives. A 5.7% failure rate with an average age of 2 years? The only one that comes close is the 5.3% HGST with over twice the average age and overall low sample size. Out of the many hard drives that I've owned in my life, the only ones to die on me have both been Seagates, with the first one being the infamous ST3000DM001, a hard drive so shit it has its own Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001).

pooloo 4y ago
They also have a drive on that list that has an Avg Age of 92 months, also they have significantly more Seagate drives compared to the rest. Additionally, most of these drives are consumer drives which are not intended to be ran at 100% for months on end.
- paulmd 4y ago
  having high failure rates despite having lots of drives is actually worse - there is the chance the HGST failures are just random chance due to small numbers of drives. But this possibility does not exist for Seagate with much larger statistical samples. AFAIK there hasn't been much of a difference shown between consumer workloads and enterprise workloads for HDD lifespan either, it's just cope and theorycrafting from people who are emotionally attached to the idea of Seagate not being shit for some reason. No other drives seem to have such problems with being used in this fashion: what is your theory for why Seagate drives are uniquely affected by being in the pods in some fashion that would not also affect WD drives or HGST drives or whoever else? Are WD drives not affected by vibration for some reason? For a while Seagate Deniers latched onto the first-gen pods as maybe being the answer but they're all long gone at this point, this failure-rate anomaly is continuing even in the newer pods. The only reasonable possibility would be that Seagate drives are simply constructed in an entirely different, less resilient fashion, which (a) is not factually supported in any way afaik, and (b) would still be very relevant for consumers to know! It's not like a home PC is vibration-free either after all. There comes a point when it's not "steelmanning" it's just denial of reality in the face of consistent evidence. Like you're not "steelmanning" climate change you're just a denier. The data has pretty consistently showed the same thing for 10+ years. It's not a "random sampling bias" that uniformly affects everyone except Seagate in the exact same way almost every single survey, it's not some magical factor that makes Seagate drives uniquely unsuited to storage-array usage but magically resilient when used in a home PC, it's not first-gen backblaze pods being bad, it's just Seagate putting out shitty drives, period the end. All these extremely complex theories to get around the very simple conclusion that Seagate has shitty parts or shitty QC and the failure rates are slightly higher as a result. A lot of the Seagate models are relatively OK, but almost all of the "outlier" drives with really high failure rates are Seagate. It is the old bayesian probability thing: get rid of Seagate and you've gotten rid of almost all of the models with high failure rates. edit: sorry Samsung on the brain since they have another wave of SSD failures too /laugh
the_third_wave 4y ago
Either you're lucky or you just have not had that many drives around... The first to fail was a Miniscribe 5¼" 20MB, it died after a week. I replaced it with a 3½" Seagate connected to an Adaptec RLL controller - this being before IDE was a thing the controller decided the encoding scheme and RLL gave you 50% extra storage space. This Seagate never died on me, I probably have it around somewhere still. Then came the Western Digital IDE drives, two of those died and took ~250MB of data with them to data heaven. They were followed by another WD, this one 1.2GB - it died. When I built a system around the famous Abit BP-6 motherboard I put in two Maxtor drives - which I should not have done, one of them died within 2 years. Meanwhile I'd helped my father get a new drive, one of those fancy IBM Deskstars. Within a year it had turned itself into a Deathstar like most of its brethren seem to have done. Then there was the 10 GB Travelstar which died, then the 20GB Travelstar which also died - but survived the canoe expedition over the Yukon safely tucked away into the water- and probably bulletproof solar-powered Virgin Webplayer I had made to document the 3½ month trip - and the 20GB Toshiba. The 2TB WD Green, dead. One of the 1TB WD Greens, dead - but its mate still running strong at a 120.000+ running hours with its 2TB brand mates coming in second at 100.000+ hours. In the DS4243 array I have replaced 5 15K 600GB drives, good that these were cheap as dirt (but take quite a bit of power to run, hence the low price). Notice that I have not had a Seagate drive die on me yet. There are a few in an array somewhere here but those still do their job even though they're quite old by now. Maybe I'm just lucky in that I never bought any of the failing types since these problems seem to be related to specific types.

controversial97 4y ago

Backblaze has stated in a blog post that they purchase drives in large quantities direct from manufacturers and negotiate for good prices. Backblaze says that a model of drive which is significantly cheaper and somewhat less reliable can be ok for them. This means that these stats may not be a very meaningful indication when purchasing a few drives from a retailer. Never the less, the world is full of situations where you have to make choices with insufficient data. I'm still going to prefer to avoid Seagate hard drives where practical.

metadat 4y ago
100% with you. Seagate is the manufacturer with drives that fail at 10x the rate of the competition. I'll avoid, because drive failures are annoying.
tjoff 4y ago
The implication being that they might knowingly buy a subpar batch or that a manufacturer would offer rebates for a subpar batch, or what?
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  Not sure if that's what OP meant, but it could be that they get better batches from manufacturers, while retail gets the rest? The other way you could read the comment would be that the stats don't mean much since Backblaze can tolerate higher defect rates if they negotiate a low enough price. But to me, that doesn't make sense since it wouldn't affect the failure rate statistics at all anyway.
- Macha 4y ago
  If drive A has a 3% failure/year rate and drive B a 1% failure/year rate, but you can get 12 of drive A for the price of 10 drive B and you're going to have stock on hand to replace drives anyway and you're confidant in your backup strategy then for a business it may still make sense to buy drive A. As a consumer, you're unlikely to keep an in-box spare, so even if you have a good backup system, a drive failure is still going to be an inconvenience, and leave you without redundancy until your replacement is shipped to you, so you might pay 20% more for drive A.

DavidD 4y ago

I have a theory that solar flares are the cause of some hard drive failures would be interesting to see if a few lead shielded cases would reduce the number of failures. I used to manage a large fleet of computers and anytime we got radio interference from solar flares we would have 3-5 hard drive failures that day.

lazide 4y ago
Out of what fleet size?
- DavidD 4y ago
  Around a 1000
rom-antics 4y ago
What were the failure modes? Was it corrupted data or were the drives permanently fried?
- DavidD 4y ago
  Corrupt data that would compromise the Operating systems, these were Dell computers with multiple different branded hard drives they would have us run their hardware diagnostic tool that would put them in the range to receive a free replacements. We didn't have to send back the old ones under the contract we had with them they would still work when reformatted but were less reliable after that.
  - GTP 4y ago
    So far I always assumed that, when talking about HDDs failing rates, they where considering the typical mechanical failure. I never considered that they could declare a failure due to some corrupted data, although it would be reasonable for a datacenter to do so.
    - DavidD 4y ago

bluedino 4y ago

I wonder what the numbers need to look like to replace the remaining 4TB pods with 16TB pods.

atYevP 4y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> That's a factor of time and power! The 16TB drives consume more power so that's part of the calculation when we swap from the 4TBs, but we are monitoring them b/c we certainly want to avoid cluster failures and have what we call "rolling migration" projects going on all the time where we perpetually migration hard drives and hardware based on durability projections, power balancing, physical capacity, etc...

RDaneel0livaw 4y ago

Looks like HGST continues to rule the pack, similar to prior years. Though, I thought the entire brand of HGST was set to be discontinued and Western Digital just taking over all naming / marketing / etc... I even see when I search for "ultrastar" or similar, it's all currently branded Western Digital. Does backblaze get some special enterprise gear?

andrewmunsell 4y ago
I tend to buy my HDDs from Provantage now-a-days. I've never bought an HGST drive (I have a combo of WD and Toshiba drives), but the HGST branding seems more prominent at Provantage (https://www.provantage.com/hgst-0f30146~7HGST0H9.htm https://www.provantage.com/hgst-0f30146~7HGST0H9.htm) versus elsewhere (ex. Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Ultrastar-HUH721212ALE600-3-5-Inch-Internal/dp/B07PF1TVND https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Ultrastar-HUH721212ALE600-3-5-In..., though I'd never buy an HDD from Amazon today due to their shipping issues)
- dspillett 4y ago
  > though I'd never buy an HDD from Amazon today due to their shipping issues I'm wary of Amazon due to co-mingling issues. I can't be sure I'm not getting something incorrectly packaged/labelled by another seller so I get a reconditioned (or simply counterfeit) unit instead of a new one.
numpad0 4y ago
I'm a total consumer in this topic, but I believe WD tried to and externally communicated that to be the plan, and drives are marked as such, but due to antitrust rulings(?) HGST remains somewhat independent and the heritages remain somewhat separate to each others. Also, there seems to be just handful of "actual" drive models in HDD market - they seem to be swapped Ladas and VW Beetles. Perhaps that makes calling them in old names make sense.
segfaultbuserr 4y ago
Some (all?) rebranded "WD Ultrastar" drives still report themselves as "HGST" as their SMART device models. I'm not sure how does Blackblaze count them. Perhaps they're (correctly) counted via the SMART model regardless of branding? Update: This issue has been covered in the Blackblaze 2020 report. They apparently existed in parallel. The original HGST drives, while still existed as of 2020, were being gradually phased out... > These drives obviously share their lineage with the HGST drives, but they report their manufacturer as WDC versus HGST. The model numbers are similar with the first three characters changing from HUH to WUH and the last three characters changing from 604, for example, to 6L4. We don’t know the significance of that change, perhaps it is the factory location, a firmware version, or some other designation. If you know, let everyone know in the comments. As with all of the major drive manufacturers, the model number carries patterned information relating to each drive model and is not randomly generated, so the 6L4 string would appear to mean something useful.

ck2 4y ago

I don't trust any of these helium filled drives to last more than a decade. Helium atom is too small and leaks through everything, eventually. Really hope I am proven wrong. Unfortunately what backblaze is excellently documenting is not archival use. I've got half TB and 1TB WDC drives that are over a decade old and still spin up fine, single platter and run cool and quiet even air filled. I think 4TB is the cutoff for air-filled but not sure anymore.

geerlingguy 4y ago
Many 8 TB and even up some 12 TB I believe don't have helium. It depends on the model and manufacturer, so you have to dig into the spec sheets to figure it out.
dannyw 4y ago
There are helium sensors in the drives. It's reported via SMART. It's monitorable.
- TwoNineFive 4y ago
  Just a note that there are no direct helium sensors in these drives. The status is inferred indirectly through some thermal sensors, conductivity, or something similar. I've read that the readings of the helium value are not very good and that it only puts out readings with granularity steps of 10-20% each. It's not great.
tzs 4y ago
> Helium atom is too small and leaks through everything, eventually. Suppose the drive were encased in solid hydrogen? Hydrogen freezes at 14 K and helium boils at 4 K so there's a 10 K range where you could have both solid hydrogen and gaseous helium. Hydrogen atoms are bigger than helium atoms, but what matters is the gaps between the hydrogen in the solid. I was unable with a bit of Googling to find out anything about the physical structure of solid hydrogen.
dehrmann 4y ago
I don't trust any spinning rust for a decade, but I suppose a pre-helium model stored in good, stable conditions should still spin up in a decade.

2c2c2c 4y ago

Anyone have experience using their s3 drop in replacement at scale?

dylan604 4y ago
My only experience was moving data from a b2 to an s3. While there were some inefficiencies with the workflow, it went as well as could be hoped for when cross chatting between cloud vendors. Installing their linux app was out of bounds of normal procedures, but it be what it b2 <hangsHeadInShame>
james_in_the_uk 4y ago
b2 or not b2, is that the question?
hedora 4y ago
I have single digit TB in it, and my synology HyperBackups fail extremely infrequently. (I'm not willing to attribute the failures to their S3 implementation, since our ISP kind of sucks.) Anyway, I haven't seen any apparent data loss over the last few years. I'm considering doing a full restore, just for the heck of it. (Especially since this article convinced me I should start replacing the aging drives in my NAS!)
- a10c 4y ago
  HyperBackup is extremely disappointing. At no point has it risen above 1MB/s when backing up to S3 (Backblaze) when other methods routinely saturate my upload (40Mb/s)

jms703 4y ago

If you're struggling to pick a drive, maybe the best approach is to find a drive that meets your needs from a maker that has a solid warranty program. With a good backup strategy, the maker of the drive may not matter as much.

alexfoo 4y ago

For those that are wondering, 2,699,664 TiB (~2700PiB or ~2.7EiB). (I've assumed TiB over TB given they are the sizes reported by the drive manufacturer.)