8 ms·

Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2024

246 points by TangerineDream 2y ago

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> A Few Good Zeroes: In Q1 2024, three drive models had zero failures They go on to list 3 Seagate models that share one common factor: Sharply lower drive counts. Backblaze had a lot fewer of these drives. All of their <5 failures are from low quantity drives. I have confidence in the rest of their report - but not with the inference that those 3 Seagate models are more reliable.
- matmatmatmat 2y ago
  This uncertainty should be accounted for in the confidence intervals of their stats.
dehrmann 2y ago
I find the stats interesting, but it's hard to actually inform any decisions because by the time the stats come out, who knows what's actually shipping.
gangstead 2y ago
I wonder how the pricing works out. I look at the failure rates and my general take away is "buy Western Digital" for my qty 1 purchases. But if you look within a category, say 14TB drives, they've purchased 4 times as many Toshiba drives as WD. Are the vendors pricing these such that it's worth a slightly higher failure rate to get the $/TB down?
- mijamo 2y ago
  If you are a large company owning hundreds of thousands of them and knowing you will have disk failures regardless, maybe. If you own just a few hundreds and a failure costs you money the logic may be completely different.
- Marsymars 2y ago
  I'd assume so. Also consider that if a drive fails under warranty, and you're already dealing with a bunch of failing drives on a regular basis, the marginal cost to get a warranty replacement is close to zero.
Whatarethese 2y ago
And people will still say they dont trust Seagate because of the 3TB drives that failed over a decade ago.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Anecdata is such a weird thing. In my own NAS, I've had 3 out of 3 WD Red drives, each a different size, die in an identical manner well before their warranty expired over the last several years. SMART says everything is fine, but the drive's utilization creeps up to a constant 100% and its write IOPS decrease until the whole array is slow as frozen molasses. That's in a constantly comfortable operating environment that's never too hot, cold, or otherwise challenging. And yet it looks like I'm the statistical outlier. Other people -- like Backblaze here -- have decent luck with the same drives that have a 100% failure rate here. Probability is a strange thing, yo. The odds of a specific person winning the lottery are effectively 0, but someone's going to. Looks like I've won the "WD means Waiting Death" sweepstakes.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Indeed, and anecdata is weighted so heavily by our minds, even when we are aware of it and consciously look at the numbers. That's what evolution gives us though. The best brains at survival are the ones that learned from their observations, so we're battling our nature by trying to disregard that. I'll never buy another Seagate because of that one piece of shit I got :-D
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Sounds like you're a victim of WD selling Reds with Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). Quite a scandal a few years ago. SMR takes advantage of the fact read heads are often smaller than write heads, so it "shingles" the tracks to get better density. However, if you need to rewrite in between tracks that are full, you need to shuffle the data around so it can re-shingle the tracks. This means as your array gets full or even just fragmented, your drives can start to need to shuffle data all over the place to rewrite a random sector. This does hell to drives in an array, which a lot of controllers have no knowledge of this shingling behavior. Shingled drives are OK when you're just constantly writing a stream of data and not going to do a lot of rewriting of data in betweeen. Think security cameras and database backups and what not. They're complete hell if you're doing lots of random files that get a lot of modifications. https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/ https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-...
pcurve 2y ago
Looks like WDC reliability has improved a lot in the past decade. Seagate continues to trail behind competitors. I guess they're basically competing on price? Because with data like this, I don't know why anyone running data center would buy Seagate over WD?
- formerly_proven 2y ago
  The WDC models which are only somewhat more expensive than Toshiba or Seagate tend to perform quite a lot worse than those. Models with the same performance are significantly more expensive.
louwrentius 2y ago
If you buy drives based on there reports, make sure your drives are operating within the same environmental parameters or these stats may not apply
fencepost 2y ago
As with every time these come out, Remember that Backblaze's usage pattern is different from yours! Well, unless you're putting large numbers of consumer SATA drives into massive storage arrays with proper power and cooling in a data center.
hwbunny 2y ago
They are kingkong. After they started publishing these Seagate seemingly stopped selling trash less and less. Had so many Seagate drives going south. Bleh. Would be nice to see SSD drive stats too. There are so many terrible SSDs out there, like SP, which has utter trash controllers. One day your drive gets locked up without any forewarning, and your data just disappears.
- MonortYp 2y ago
  Backblaze has been slowly releasing SSD stats, but their usage of HDDs dwarfs SSD usage, so it won’t be as useful. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2023-mid-year-drive-stats-review/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2023-mid-year-dri...
sakshatshinde 2y ago
Can't thank backblaze enough...
ncr100 2y ago
https://youtu.be/IgJ6YolLxYE https://youtu.be/IgJ6YolLxYE This video presents AFR, failure rates, derived from prior backblaze reports, aggregated. Definitely worth a watch if you're interested in this report.
Malidir 2y ago
Why no Samsung?
GGO 2y ago
I buy hard drives based on these reports. Thank you Backblaze.
- speedgoose 2y ago
  I don’t buy hard drives based on these reports. I buy SSDs and let my cloud providers deal with hard drives.
- Scene_Cast2 2y ago
  Where do you buy your drives? Last time I was in the market, I couldn't find a reputable seller selling the exact models in the report. I'm afraid that the less reputable sellers (random 3rd party sellers on Amazon) are selling refurbished drives. I ended up buying a similar sounding but not same model from CDW.
  - nikisweeting 2y ago
    Lots of good options here: https://diskprices.com/ https://diskprices.com/
    - dsr_ 2y ago
      Note that they list at least one vendor as selling "New" drives when they are not even close to being new.
      - nikisweeting 2y ago
        It's definitely scraped with a few simple queries and not moderated by a human, you have to manually check before buying of course. It just saves a few minutes of time automating the initial search.
      - synack 2y ago
        I think there will eventually be a false advertising lawsuit or some regulatory action against Amazon about this. Until that happens, it’s hard to say for certain which items are used.
bluedino 2y ago
> The 4TB Toshiba (model: MD04ABA400V) are not in the Q1 2024 Drive Stats tables. This was not an oversight. The last of these drives became a migration target early in Q1 and their data was securely transferred to pristine 16TB Toshiba drives. That's a milestone. Imagine the racks that were eliminated
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  Yeah, but just thinking about it reminds me how annoyed I am that they increased the B2 pricing by 20% last year. Right after launching B2, in late 2015, they made their post about storage pod 5.0, saying it "enabled" B2 at the $5/TB price, at 44 cents per gigabyte and a raw 45TB per rack unit. In late 2022 they posted about supermicro servers costing 20 cents per gigabyte and fitting a raw 240TB per rack unit. So as they migrate or get new data, that's 1/5 as many servers to manage, costing about half as much per TB. It's hard to figure out how the profit margin wasn't much better, despite the various prices increases they surely had to deal with. The free egress based on data stored was nice, but the change still stings. Maybe I'm overlooking something but I'm not sure what it would be. In contrast the price increases they've had for their unlimited backup product have always felt fine to me. Personal data keeps growing, and hard drive prices haven't been dropping fast. Easy enough. But B2 has always been per byte. And don't think I'm being unfair and only blaming them because they release a lot of information. I saw hard drives go from 4TB to 16TB myself, and I would have done a similar analysis even if they were secretive.
  - philistine 2y ago
    Inflation. At the rate it went up the last couple of years, a 20% price increase to put them back on the right side of profits is more than probable.
    - Moru 2y ago
      Also a storage inflation on the users side. People have more data on bigger drives that wants a backup.
rokkamokka 2y ago
I always click these every time they come up. Can't tell you how much I appreciate them releasing stats like this!
sdwr 2y ago
Says the annual failure rate is 1.5%, but average time to failure is 2.5 years? Those numbers don't line up. Are most drives retired without failing?
- codemac 2y ago
  Drives have warranties, after which the manufacturer doesn't make any claims about it's durability. This could put your fleet at wild and significant risk if things start hitting a wall and failing en masse. You may not be able to repair away if as you're repairing the data you're copying to yet another dying drive. So you have usually a lifetime of drive tput and start/stop values you want to stay under, and depending on how accurate your data is for each drive you may push beyond the drive warranties. But you will generally stop before the drive actually fails.
- rsync 2y ago
  "Are most drives retired without failing?" Yes, certainly. One can watch both SMART indicators as well as certain ZFS stats and catch a problem drive before it actually fails. I like to remove drives from zpools early because there is a common intermediate state they can fall into where they have not failed out but dramatically impact ZFS performance as they timeout/retry certain operations thousands and thousands of times.
  - favorited 2y ago
    What's the best way to monitor those ZFS stats? I just rely on scheduled ZFS scrubs, and the occasional `zpool status -v`...
- mnw21cam 2y ago
  Yes, and because of that the numbers on the average time to failure are completely meaningless. The drives the don't ever fail skew the numbers completely. If a fantastically reliable drive were to have 5/5000 drives fail, but they all failed in the first month and then the rest carried on forever, then that would show here as having a lower "reliability" than a dire drive where 4000/5000 drives fail after a year. I'd like to see instead something like mean time until 2% of the drives fail. That'd actually be comparable between drives. And yes, it would also mean that some drive types haven't reached 2% failure yet, so they'd be shown as ">X months". This is what a Kaplan-Meier survival curve was meant for [0]. Please use it. Also, it'd be great to see the confidence intervals on the annualised failure rates. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaplan%E2%80%93Meier_estimator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaplan%E2%80%93Meier_estimator
kayson 2y ago
Does Backblaze ever buy refurbs? I'm guessing not, but I'd be curious to see any data on how failure rates compare after manufacturers recertify.
- hwbunny 2y ago
  Refurbed drives, at least for Seagate, are terrible.
- jjeaff 2y ago
  I can't think of any reason why the lifetime would be any different for a refurb. of course, you need to start from when the drive was originally used. of course, there is probably also some additional wear and tear just due to the removal, handling, and additional shipping of the drives.
- from-nibly 2y ago
  In some ways that would be incredibly noisy to test. However it could be a good way to measure the practicality of S.M.A.R.T metrics. Finding out how accurate they are at predicting hdd lifespan would be a great finding.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Does anyone find value in SMART metrics? In my experience, the drives report "healthy" until they fail, then they report "failed" I've personally never tracked the detailed metrics to see if anything is predictive of impending failure, but I've never seen the overall status be anything but "healthy" unless the drive had already failed.
    - favorited 2y ago
      I've had an M.2 NVMe drive start reporting bad blocks via SMART. I kept using it for non-critical storage, but replaced it as my boot drive. Obviously not the same failure pattern as spinning rust, but I was glad for the early warning anyway.
    - 2y ago
jpgvm 2y ago
Amazing these have continued. I base my NAS purchase decisions on these and so far haven't led me astray.
- objektif 2y ago
  Which specific ones do you like so far?
  - jpgvm 2y ago
    I have had 48 HGST He8 8TB drives online since 2016. 2 failures in that time, one was warranted the other happened recently.
- Marsymars 2y ago
  How would they lead you astray? I wouldn't consider a drive failure in a home NAS to indicate that - even their most statistically reliable drives still require redundancy/backup - if you haven't experienced a drive failure yet, that's just chance.
  - paulmd 2y ago
    ever since backblaze started doing these there has been a dedicated set of seagate fanboys (I know, it’s the oddest thing to fanboy over) who come up with literally any excuse to avoid acknowledging that seagate might have higher than normal failure rates, and that has included throwing shade at “well, you don’t know the failure rate of those Toshibas and WDs in home usage!!!”.
  - jpgvm 2y ago
    Well.. that might be true for a lot of normal NAS with 8 drives or less. I on the other hand have a 4U 48 bay Chenbro so drive failures are somewhat significant for me lol. Redundancy wise it's 4 raidz2 vdevs with 12 drives each and backed up to rsync.net I have had 2 drive failures, one was shortly after commissioning and the other happened a few months ago which was pretty random. I'm using HGST drives, specifically 8TB He8 and they have been really solid in operation since 2016. I don't have any spares left now though so when I get back to where the chassis is hosted I will be doing a rebuild onto 16TB drives. On the other hand in my professional life I experienced arrays that had multiple drives fail in quick succession (especially around 2010-2012 era) from less ... reliable brands cough Seagate cough. So I would consider 2 failures from ~1.5M drive hours to be very good and thank Backblaze for convincing me to shell out on these rather more expensive drives.
MarkG509 2y ago
I, too, love Backblaze's reports. But they provide no information regarding drive endurance. While I became aware of this with SSDs, HDD manufacturers are reporting this too, usually as a warranty item, and with surprisingly lower numbers than I would have expected. For example, in the Pro-sumer space, both WD's Red Pro and Gold HDDs report[1] their endurance limit as 550TB/year total bytes "transferred* to or from the drive hard drive", regardless of drive size. [1] See Specifications, and especially their footnote 1 at the bottom of the page: https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-pro-sata-hdd?sku=WD161KFGX https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-r...
- wtallis 2y ago
  The endurance figures for hard drives are probably derived from the rated number of seek operations for the heads, which is why it doesn't matter whether the operations are for reading or writing data. But that bakes in some assumptions about the mix of random vs sequential IO. And of course the figures are subject to de-rating when the company doesn't want the warranty to cover anything close to the real expected lifespan, especially for products further down the lineup.

> A Few Good Zeroes: In Q1 2024, three drive models had zero failures They go on to list 3 Seagate models that share one common factor: Sharply lower drive counts. Backblaze had a lot fewer of these drives. All of their <5 failures are from low quantity drives. I have confidence in the rest of their report - but not with the inference that those 3 Seagate models are more reliable.

matmatmatmat 2y ago
This uncertainty should be accounted for in the confidence intervals of their stats.

dehrmann 2y ago

I find the stats interesting, but it's hard to actually inform any decisions because by the time the stats come out, who knows what's actually shipping.

gangstead 2y ago

I wonder how the pricing works out. I look at the failure rates and my general take away is "buy Western Digital" for my qty 1 purchases. But if you look within a category, say 14TB drives, they've purchased 4 times as many Toshiba drives as WD. Are the vendors pricing these such that it's worth a slightly higher failure rate to get the $/TB down?

mijamo 2y ago
If you are a large company owning hundreds of thousands of them and knowing you will have disk failures regardless, maybe. If you own just a few hundreds and a failure costs you money the logic may be completely different.
Marsymars 2y ago
I'd assume so. Also consider that if a drive fails under warranty, and you're already dealing with a bunch of failing drives on a regular basis, the marginal cost to get a warranty replacement is close to zero.

Whatarethese 2y ago

And people will still say they dont trust Seagate because of the 3TB drives that failed over a decade ago.

kstrauser 2y ago
Anecdata is such a weird thing. In my own NAS, I've had 3 out of 3 WD Red drives, each a different size, die in an identical manner well before their warranty expired over the last several years. SMART says everything is fine, but the drive's utilization creeps up to a constant 100% and its write IOPS decrease until the whole array is slow as frozen molasses. That's in a constantly comfortable operating environment that's never too hot, cold, or otherwise challenging. And yet it looks like I'm the statistical outlier. Other people -- like Backblaze here -- have decent luck with the same drives that have a 100% failure rate here. Probability is a strange thing, yo. The odds of a specific person winning the lottery are effectively 0, but someone's going to. Looks like I've won the "WD means Waiting Death" sweepstakes.
- freedomben 2y ago
  Indeed, and anecdata is weighted so heavily by our minds, even when we are aware of it and consciously look at the numbers. That's what evolution gives us though. The best brains at survival are the ones that learned from their observations, so we're battling our nature by trying to disregard that. I'll never buy another Seagate because of that one piece of shit I got :-D
- vel0city 2y ago
  Sounds like you're a victim of WD selling Reds with Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). Quite a scandal a few years ago. SMR takes advantage of the fact read heads are often smaller than write heads, so it "shingles" the tracks to get better density. However, if you need to rewrite in between tracks that are full, you need to shuffle the data around so it can re-shingle the tracks. This means as your array gets full or even just fragmented, your drives can start to need to shuffle data all over the place to rewrite a random sector. This does hell to drives in an array, which a lot of controllers have no knowledge of this shingling behavior. Shingled drives are OK when you're just constantly writing a stream of data and not going to do a lot of rewriting of data in betweeen. Think security cameras and database backups and what not. They're complete hell if you're doing lots of random files that get a lot of modifications. https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/ https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-...

pcurve 2y ago

Looks like WDC reliability has improved a lot in the past decade. Seagate continues to trail behind competitors. I guess they're basically competing on price? Because with data like this, I don't know why anyone running data center would buy Seagate over WD?

formerly_proven 2y ago
The WDC models which are only somewhat more expensive than Toshiba or Seagate tend to perform quite a lot worse than those. Models with the same performance are significantly more expensive.

louwrentius 2y ago

If you buy drives based on there reports, make sure your drives are operating within the same environmental parameters or these stats may not apply

fencepost 2y ago

As with every time these come out, Remember that Backblaze's usage pattern is different from yours! Well, unless you're putting large numbers of consumer SATA drives into massive storage arrays with proper power and cooling in a data center.

hwbunny 2y ago

They are kingkong. After they started publishing these Seagate seemingly stopped selling trash less and less. Had so many Seagate drives going south. Bleh. Would be nice to see SSD drive stats too. There are so many terrible SSDs out there, like SP, which has utter trash controllers. One day your drive gets locked up without any forewarning, and your data just disappears.

MonortYp 2y ago
Backblaze has been slowly releasing SSD stats, but their usage of HDDs dwarfs SSD usage, so it won’t be as useful. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2023-mid-year-drive-stats-review/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2023-mid-year-dri...

sakshatshinde 2y ago

Can't thank backblaze enough...

ncr100 2y ago

https://youtu.be/IgJ6YolLxYE https://youtu.be/IgJ6YolLxYE This video presents AFR, failure rates, derived from prior backblaze reports, aggregated. Definitely worth a watch if you're interested in this report.

Malidir 2y ago

Why no Samsung?

GGO 2y ago

I buy hard drives based on these reports. Thank you Backblaze.

speedgoose 2y ago
I don’t buy hard drives based on these reports. I buy SSDs and let my cloud providers deal with hard drives.
Scene_Cast2 2y ago
Where do you buy your drives? Last time I was in the market, I couldn't find a reputable seller selling the exact models in the report. I'm afraid that the less reputable sellers (random 3rd party sellers on Amazon) are selling refurbished drives. I ended up buying a similar sounding but not same model from CDW.
- nikisweeting 2y ago
  Lots of good options here: https://diskprices.com/ https://diskprices.com/
  - dsr_ 2y ago
    Note that they list at least one vendor as selling "New" drives when they are not even close to being new.
    - nikisweeting 2y ago
      It's definitely scraped with a few simple queries and not moderated by a human, you have to manually check before buying of course. It just saves a few minutes of time automating the initial search.
    - synack 2y ago
      I think there will eventually be a false advertising lawsuit or some regulatory action against Amazon about this. Until that happens, it’s hard to say for certain which items are used.

bluedino 2y ago

> The 4TB Toshiba (model: MD04ABA400V) are not in the Q1 2024 Drive Stats tables. This was not an oversight. The last of these drives became a migration target early in Q1 and their data was securely transferred to pristine 16TB Toshiba drives. That's a milestone. Imagine the racks that were eliminated

Dylan16807 2y ago
Yeah, but just thinking about it reminds me how annoyed I am that they increased the B2 pricing by 20% last year. Right after launching B2, in late 2015, they made their post about storage pod 5.0, saying it "enabled" B2 at the $5/TB price, at 44 cents per gigabyte and a raw 45TB per rack unit. In late 2022 they posted about supermicro servers costing 20 cents per gigabyte and fitting a raw 240TB per rack unit. So as they migrate or get new data, that's 1/5 as many servers to manage, costing about half as much per TB. It's hard to figure out how the profit margin wasn't much better, despite the various prices increases they surely had to deal with. The free egress based on data stored was nice, but the change still stings. Maybe I'm overlooking something but I'm not sure what it would be. In contrast the price increases they've had for their unlimited backup product have always felt fine to me. Personal data keeps growing, and hard drive prices haven't been dropping fast. Easy enough. But B2 has always been per byte. And don't think I'm being unfair and only blaming them because they release a lot of information. I saw hard drives go from 4TB to 16TB myself, and I would have done a similar analysis even if they were secretive.
- philistine 2y ago
  Inflation. At the rate it went up the last couple of years, a 20% price increase to put them back on the right side of profits is more than probable.
  - Moru 2y ago
    Also a storage inflation on the users side. People have more data on bigger drives that wants a backup.

rokkamokka 2y ago

I always click these every time they come up. Can't tell you how much I appreciate them releasing stats like this!

sdwr 2y ago

Says the annual failure rate is 1.5%, but average time to failure is 2.5 years? Those numbers don't line up. Are most drives retired without failing?

codemac 2y ago
Drives have warranties, after which the manufacturer doesn't make any claims about it's durability. This could put your fleet at wild and significant risk if things start hitting a wall and failing en masse. You may not be able to repair away if as you're repairing the data you're copying to yet another dying drive. So you have usually a lifetime of drive tput and start/stop values you want to stay under, and depending on how accurate your data is for each drive you may push beyond the drive warranties. But you will generally stop before the drive actually fails.
rsync 2y ago
"Are most drives retired without failing?" Yes, certainly. One can watch both SMART indicators as well as certain ZFS stats and catch a problem drive before it actually fails. I like to remove drives from zpools early because there is a common intermediate state they can fall into where they have not failed out but dramatically impact ZFS performance as they timeout/retry certain operations thousands and thousands of times.
- favorited 2y ago
  What's the best way to monitor those ZFS stats? I just rely on scheduled ZFS scrubs, and the occasional `zpool status -v`...
mnw21cam 2y ago
Yes, and because of that the numbers on the average time to failure are completely meaningless. The drives the don't ever fail skew the numbers completely. If a fantastically reliable drive were to have 5/5000 drives fail, but they all failed in the first month and then the rest carried on forever, then that would show here as having a lower "reliability" than a dire drive where 4000/5000 drives fail after a year. I'd like to see instead something like mean time until 2% of the drives fail. That'd actually be comparable between drives. And yes, it would also mean that some drive types haven't reached 2% failure yet, so they'd be shown as ">X months". This is what a Kaplan-Meier survival curve was meant for [0]. Please use it. Also, it'd be great to see the confidence intervals on the annualised failure rates. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaplan%E2%80%93Meier_estimator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaplan%E2%80%93Meier_estimator

kayson 2y ago

Does Backblaze ever buy refurbs? I'm guessing not, but I'd be curious to see any data on how failure rates compare after manufacturers recertify.

hwbunny 2y ago
Refurbed drives, at least for Seagate, are terrible.
jjeaff 2y ago
I can't think of any reason why the lifetime would be any different for a refurb. of course, you need to start from when the drive was originally used. of course, there is probably also some additional wear and tear just due to the removal, handling, and additional shipping of the drives.
from-nibly 2y ago
In some ways that would be incredibly noisy to test. However it could be a good way to measure the practicality of S.M.A.R.T metrics. Finding out how accurate they are at predicting hdd lifespan would be a great finding.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Does anyone find value in SMART metrics? In my experience, the drives report "healthy" until they fail, then they report "failed" I've personally never tracked the detailed metrics to see if anything is predictive of impending failure, but I've never seen the overall status be anything but "healthy" unless the drive had already failed.
  - favorited 2y ago
    I've had an M.2 NVMe drive start reporting bad blocks via SMART. I kept using it for non-critical storage, but replaced it as my boot drive. Obviously not the same failure pattern as spinning rust, but I was glad for the early warning anyway.
  - 2y ago

jpgvm 2y ago

Amazing these have continued. I base my NAS purchase decisions on these and so far haven't led me astray.

objektif 2y ago
Which specific ones do you like so far?
- jpgvm 2y ago
  I have had 48 HGST He8 8TB drives online since 2016. 2 failures in that time, one was warranted the other happened recently.
Marsymars 2y ago
How would they lead you astray? I wouldn't consider a drive failure in a home NAS to indicate that - even their most statistically reliable drives still require redundancy/backup - if you haven't experienced a drive failure yet, that's just chance.
- paulmd 2y ago
  ever since backblaze started doing these there has been a dedicated set of seagate fanboys (I know, it’s the oddest thing to fanboy over) who come up with literally any excuse to avoid acknowledging that seagate might have higher than normal failure rates, and that has included throwing shade at “well, you don’t know the failure rate of those Toshibas and WDs in home usage!!!”.
- jpgvm 2y ago
  Well.. that might be true for a lot of normal NAS with 8 drives or less. I on the other hand have a 4U 48 bay Chenbro so drive failures are somewhat significant for me lol. Redundancy wise it's 4 raidz2 vdevs with 12 drives each and backed up to rsync.net I have had 2 drive failures, one was shortly after commissioning and the other happened a few months ago which was pretty random. I'm using HGST drives, specifically 8TB He8 and they have been really solid in operation since 2016. I don't have any spares left now though so when I get back to where the chassis is hosted I will be doing a rebuild onto 16TB drives. On the other hand in my professional life I experienced arrays that had multiple drives fail in quick succession (especially around 2010-2012 era) from less ... reliable brands cough Seagate cough. So I would consider 2 failures from ~1.5M drive hours to be very good and thank Backblaze for convincing me to shell out on these rather more expensive drives.

MarkG509 2y ago

I, too, love Backblaze's reports. But they provide no information regarding drive endurance. While I became aware of this with SSDs, HDD manufacturers are reporting this too, usually as a warranty item, and with surprisingly lower numbers than I would have expected. For example, in the Pro-sumer space, both WD's Red Pro and Gold HDDs report[1] their endurance limit as 550TB/year total bytes "transferred* to or from the drive hard drive", regardless of drive size. [1] See Specifications, and especially their footnote 1 at the bottom of the page: https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-pro-sata-hdd?sku=WD161KFGX https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-r...

wtallis 2y ago
The endurance figures for hard drives are probably derived from the rated number of seek operations for the heads, which is why it doesn't matter whether the operations are for reading or writing data. But that bakes in some assumptions about the mix of random vs sequential IO. And of course the figures are subject to de-rating when the company doesn't want the warranty to cover anything close to the real expected lifespan, especially for products further down the lineup.