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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

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.
  - tjoff 4y ago
    I don't follow. The statistics backblaze post doesn't implicate that you should buy the same drives they do. It is because of theses statistics that you have (at least an inkling of) a fighting chance to pick the drive that more suits your usecase. Or perhaps a notion of brand performance. Of course, you won't get statistics about drives that they don't buy. And if you then assume that more expensive drives have better failure rates then that might skew the data. But in there lies a lot of assumptions you really can't make. For one, that an expensive drive for a consumer is also an expensive for backblaze. And also, that there is correlation between end user price and failure rates. Which generally I don't really think there is, within the alternatives that the consumer have access to (and reasonable price-ranges) at least. And it probably will vary between different markets as well.
    - Macha 4y ago
      Backblaze's article points out that sometimes they will buy drives that are less reliable but cheaper, as that makes sense for their business model. The top level commenter points out that this strategy may not make as much sense for the individual consumer where you don't have backblaze levels of drives to amortise the failure probability and deal with it. That's it, that's the point. It's not a rebuttal of the backblaze post at all, nor is it intended to be. The top level commenter was simply pointing out "don't buy mostly seagate drives because backblaze does" as backblaze explained their strategy in drive selection and some people may not consider the differences between their use case and backblaze's.
      - tjoff 4y ago
        The whole point of the statistics is that you can pick what you want. Why would you dismiss the statistics and buy what backblaze does? Defeats the entire point of the statistics and article in the first palce. Top level comment: >This means that these stats may not be a very meaningful indication when purchasing a few drives from a retailer. That doesn't follow.
        4y ago
neilv 4y ago
> they purchase drives in large quantities direct from manufacturers Given that the manufacturer knows that Backblaze publishes its influential drive stats... do we know that the drive units that the manufacturer ships to Backblaze are representative of the quality of the same models available at retail?
- brianwski 4y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Do we know if these drives are the same as you would purchase in a retail outlet Seagate (for instance) won't sell ANYBODY drives directly, so they force us to get bids from various resellers and distributors. So when we pick the lowest price, I don't think Seagate knows who the drives are going to, but there might be a trick in there somewhere I am not aware of.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Have you considered becoming a distributor yourself? I would assume at a certain purchasing scale, the cost benefit is apparent, but perhaps not.
    - Kye 4y ago
      This is why every major tech company eventually becomes a domain registrar.
      - jjeaff 4y ago
        Do all major tech companies really register that many domains? I assumed that becoming a registrar was more about pushing your control up the pipeline to reduce risk if things like losing your domain name was the main reason. Rather than saving money on registrations.
- zh3 4y ago
  If we assume that Backblaze gets special treatment from every manufactured who supplies it, that would suggest we're seeing stats that are the best the manufacturer can manage. Which seems a reasonable proxy for what they sell (lots of statistical quibbling about this view aside).
itchyouch 4y ago
Even when they were shucking retail drives in the 1-4TB era, Seagate didn't have the greatest stats, with about a 5-30% failure rate (IIRC, over ~3 years or so), especially their 3T drives. I ran an array with 1.5T and 3T Seagates and within a 1-3 years, I replaced at least 1/3 of my Seagates, but I made sure to replace the Seagates with Hitachis and Western Digitals, even though they were slightly more expensive.
- fomine3 4y ago
  ST3000DM001 was terrible one. Everyone prefer WD after that (and before the WD Red SMR gate) I don't see so much significant higher failure rate on my 12TB Seagate drive array.
cm2187 4y ago
You converge to the mean fairly quickly. Build a NAS of 12 drives and those stats become meaningful. That being said with 50TB drives just around the corner [1] and SSD caching becoming the norm, 12 bays consumer NAS will become rare. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/18733/seagate-confirms-30tb-hamr-hdds-in-q3-envisions-50tb-drives-in-a-few-years https://www.anandtech.com/show/18733/seagate-confirms-30tb-h...
- Teever 4y ago
  Why do you think that 50TB drives will make 12 bay NAS become rare?
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    We'll just hoard bigger files, like thus far. My iPhone shoots 90 megabyte photos.
    - t0bia_s 4y ago
      Thats is quite poor compression. My 26 mpix Fujifilm cameras makes ~30 MB compressed RAFs that for sure has better image quality in final output.
      - Hamuko 4y ago
        The iPhone is 48 megapixels.
        t0bia_s 4y ago
        Yea, clear demonstration why more pixels ≠ better quality. But ridicolous amount of data.
        lostmsu 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_photography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_photography Specifically, the night mode on recent (2y) devices.
iot_devs 4y ago
I really struggle to follow this logic. You could argue to remove the driver that are represented less than 100 times (and it will be a stretch). But once you have so many samples, there is no reason to not believe that your driver will not follow the same distribution.

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.
- tjoff 4y ago
  I don't follow. The statistics backblaze post doesn't implicate that you should buy the same drives they do. It is because of theses statistics that you have (at least an inkling of) a fighting chance to pick the drive that more suits your usecase. Or perhaps a notion of brand performance. Of course, you won't get statistics about drives that they don't buy. And if you then assume that more expensive drives have better failure rates then that might skew the data. But in there lies a lot of assumptions you really can't make. For one, that an expensive drive for a consumer is also an expensive for backblaze. And also, that there is correlation between end user price and failure rates. Which generally I don't really think there is, within the alternatives that the consumer have access to (and reasonable price-ranges) at least. And it probably will vary between different markets as well.
  - Macha 4y ago
    Backblaze's article points out that sometimes they will buy drives that are less reliable but cheaper, as that makes sense for their business model. The top level commenter points out that this strategy may not make as much sense for the individual consumer where you don't have backblaze levels of drives to amortise the failure probability and deal with it. That's it, that's the point. It's not a rebuttal of the backblaze post at all, nor is it intended to be. The top level commenter was simply pointing out "don't buy mostly seagate drives because backblaze does" as backblaze explained their strategy in drive selection and some people may not consider the differences between their use case and backblaze's.
    - tjoff 4y ago
      The whole point of the statistics is that you can pick what you want. Why would you dismiss the statistics and buy what backblaze does? Defeats the entire point of the statistics and article in the first palce. Top level comment: >This means that these stats may not be a very meaningful indication when purchasing a few drives from a retailer. That doesn't follow.
      - 4y ago

neilv 4y ago

> they purchase drives in large quantities direct from manufacturers Given that the manufacturer knows that Backblaze publishes its influential drive stats... do we know that the drive units that the manufacturer ships to Backblaze are representative of the quality of the same models available at retail?

brianwski 4y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Do we know if these drives are the same as you would purchase in a retail outlet Seagate (for instance) won't sell ANYBODY drives directly, so they force us to get bids from various resellers and distributors. So when we pick the lowest price, I don't think Seagate knows who the drives are going to, but there might be a trick in there somewhere I am not aware of.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Have you considered becoming a distributor yourself? I would assume at a certain purchasing scale, the cost benefit is apparent, but perhaps not.
  - Kye 4y ago
    This is why every major tech company eventually becomes a domain registrar.
    - jjeaff 4y ago
      Do all major tech companies really register that many domains? I assumed that becoming a registrar was more about pushing your control up the pipeline to reduce risk if things like losing your domain name was the main reason. Rather than saving money on registrations.
zh3 4y ago
If we assume that Backblaze gets special treatment from every manufactured who supplies it, that would suggest we're seeing stats that are the best the manufacturer can manage. Which seems a reasonable proxy for what they sell (lots of statistical quibbling about this view aside).

itchyouch 4y ago

Even when they were shucking retail drives in the 1-4TB era, Seagate didn't have the greatest stats, with about a 5-30% failure rate (IIRC, over ~3 years or so), especially their 3T drives. I ran an array with 1.5T and 3T Seagates and within a 1-3 years, I replaced at least 1/3 of my Seagates, but I made sure to replace the Seagates with Hitachis and Western Digitals, even though they were slightly more expensive.

fomine3 4y ago
ST3000DM001 was terrible one. Everyone prefer WD after that (and before the WD Red SMR gate) I don't see so much significant higher failure rate on my 12TB Seagate drive array.

cm2187 4y ago

You converge to the mean fairly quickly. Build a NAS of 12 drives and those stats become meaningful. That being said with 50TB drives just around the corner [1] and SSD caching becoming the norm, 12 bays consumer NAS will become rare. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/18733/seagate-confirms-30tb-hamr-hdds-in-q3-envisions-50tb-drives-in-a-few-years https://www.anandtech.com/show/18733/seagate-confirms-30tb-h...

Teever 4y ago
Why do you think that 50TB drives will make 12 bay NAS become rare?
- Hamuko 4y ago
  We'll just hoard bigger files, like thus far. My iPhone shoots 90 megabyte photos.
  - t0bia_s 4y ago
    Thats is quite poor compression. My 26 mpix Fujifilm cameras makes ~30 MB compressed RAFs that for sure has better image quality in final output.
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      The iPhone is 48 megapixels.
      - t0bia_s 4y ago
        Yea, clear demonstration why more pixels ≠ better quality. But ridicolous amount of data.
        lostmsu 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_photography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_photography Specifically, the night mode on recent (2y) devices.

iot_devs 4y ago

I really struggle to follow this logic. You could argue to remove the driver that are represented less than 100 times (and it will be a stretch). But once you have so many samples, there is no reason to not believe that your driver will not follow the same distribution.