Yes, Backblaze optimizes for planned failure rates and the consequences for their operations, and they will take cheap and fails if it's cheap enough and you ca

Yes, Backblaze optimizes for planned failure rates and the consequences for their operations, and they will take cheap and fails if it's cheap enough and you can give them 10 million. that's why they didn't overly care about the seagate failures from the thailand thing etc. we need hard drives, we need to not pay $1k a drive (whatever), let's go have people buy the externals we can get. And seagate has always shipped by the truckload, and now they're cheap because people avoid them lol (legitimately). I also agree with your point that you're optimizing for something different than backblaze. Same for a lot of homelab users. High failure rates on seagate? Umm, if they're sensitive that actually might make them worse in consumer service if they actually do fail all the time. Your whole disk (possibly array, hope you had backups) can go down and some of these failure rates have been absurd, it's like 130% annualized failure rate (everything is dying within 8 months) on the worst of it. And it's just consistently always seagate that is fucking up and while I'm sure This Time Is Different I have so far managed to evade all hard drive failure completely since I kicked seagate to the curb. including my seagate 3tb from the worst model (probably bet it's dead now tho lol) and an ancient seagate laptop hdd from my first laptop (conroe). WD has mostly been fine except for the stealth SMR thing. I've never had a problem with any of my WD Reds, I knew what was on the market at the time (8TB red and hgst white label heliums) and I bought a bunch (8x8tb for $135/dr, it was cheap) and shucked them, and I got those exact models and it was fine. I should spin up my old USB 3.0 raid array and see if it spins, 4xWD Red 2TB as well, never been a problem (and that was 5400rpm). Toshiba has also been fantastic in terms of quality, and the X300 and N300 are basically the same in all respects other than name (the bit error stuff is bullshit). Toshiba has much smaller volume than either of the other two, but, I love their products when they're available and price-competitive, they've done great for me. Personally for HDDs I just bought some HGST helium 14tb SAS3s from serverpartdeals for $135 a pop. the fanout of a SAS controller is nice in my environment anyway. that's gonna be my cold storage to migrate off 8x8 - I don't see a reason to run 6+2, I do see a reason to run 3+1 and just increase capacity and have alternate backups of important stuff. You can also just buy 7.92TB enterprise U.2 2.5" TLC NVME drives for around $350, but then you need a trimode adapter (if SAS) to run them. But that's preferable to me rather than running consumer M.2 NVMe at $170-200 for 4TB. You can also run them off pcie adapter cards or M.2 slots (with riser cable) of course, but, they do run hot and I like the fanout factor, not like I'm ever going to hit anything super hard.