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Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
- comboy 2y agoHuh, what happened to HGST?
- antithesis-nl 2y agoThey, ironically, got acquired by Western Digital. But the 'Ultrastar' line name is still alive, if that's what you're looking for. 'Deskstar' seems to be gone, though.
- betaby 2y agoFrom that table I understand that WD are the most reliable nowadays. Especially 16TB models. Is my understanding correct?
- antithesis-nl 2y agoIt's a wash. Modern mechanical HDDs are so reliable that the vendor basically doesn't matter. Especially if you stick with 'Enterprise'-tier drives (preferably with a SAS interface), you should be good. Aside from some mishaps (that don't necessarily impact reliability) with vendors failing to disclose the HAMR nature of some consumer HDDs, I don't think there have been any truly disastrous series in the past 10-15 years or so. You're more likely to get bitten by supply-chain substitutions (and get used drives instead of new ones) these days, even though that won't necessarily lead to data loss.
- userbinator 2y agoI don't think there have been any truly disastrous series in the past 10-15 years or so ST3000DM001.
- nubinetwork 2y ago> 'Deskstar' seems to be gone, though. Considering we used to call them deathstars, I'm surprised they didn't get rid of the line sooner...
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y agoI still have some of those in working condition, somewhere. If I can be bothered to power on the antiques, which they are built in. Which is rare, but it happens. I abused them really hard when they weren't antique. Still working every time, so far...
- neilv 2y agoEvery year, this seems like great brand promotion for Backblaze, to technical prospective customers, and a nice service to the field. What are some other examples from other companies of this, besides open source code?
- ajross 2y agoBenson Leung's USB cable crusade comes to mind. Also Jim Gettys' coming out of seeming retirement to educate us all about Bufferbloat.
- bityard 2y agoThis is called "content marketing" and there are usually at least a handful of them on the HN front page at any given time. Although I will say that the BackBlaze drive stats articles are a much higher effort and standard of quality than you typically see for this tactic.
- CTDOCodebases 2y agoIt's worth noting that this type of marketing can also improves page rankings.
- devrand 2y agoPuget Systems has similar publications covering their experience building client systems, though not always in the same level of detail. They also have PugetBench to benchmark systems in real-world applications/workflows.
- samch 2y agoA company called TechEmpower used to run periodic web framework benchmarks and share out the results using nice dashboard. Not sure why they stopped doing these. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune§ion=data-r22 https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s... Edit: Adding a shoutout to the iFixIt teardowns that are also quite informative content: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown Edit 2: Also Lumafield CT scans: https://www.scanofthemonth.com/ https://www.scanofthemonth.com/
- theandrewbailey 2y ago> I have been authoring the various Drive Stats reports for the past ten years and this will be my last one. I am retiring, or perhaps in Drive Stats vernacular, it would be “migrating.” Thank you for all these reports over the years.
- ganoushoreilly 2y agoThey really have been great, the bar was set high!
- fyrabanks 2y agoI almost cannot believe I've been reading these for 10 years now.
- mhh__ 2y agoSo long and thanks for all the disks!
- atYevP 2y agoYev here -> That's what I said!!! Great minds :P
- stego-tech 2y agoSeriously. In addition to helping inform my purchasing decisions, these reports also taught me the most valuable lesson of data: that it can only ever inform most likely patterns, but never guarantee a specific outcome. Until you act upon it, the data has no intrinsic value, and once you act upon it, it cannot guarantee the outcome you desire. Thanks for a decade of amazing statistics and lessons. Enjoy resilvering into retirement!
- ddmf 2y agoThey've been very informative, thanks.
- gosub100 2y agoThanks for dutifully providing us this info on (many a) silver platter.
- Mistletoe 2y agoRemember when Seagate sponsored the /r/datahoarder subreddit instead of making better hard drives?
- louwrentius 2y agoWhen I started my current 24-bay NAS more than 10 years ago, I specifically looked at the Backblaze drive stats (which were a new thing at that time) to determine which drives to buy (I chose 4TB 7200rpm HGST drives). My Louwrentius stats are: zero drive failures over 10+ years. Meanwhile, the author (Andy Klein) of Backblaze Drive Stats mentions he is retiring, I wish him well and thanks! PS. The data on my 24-drive NAS would fit on two modern 32TB drives. Crazy.
- sys32768 2y agoI had five Seagates fail in my Synology NAS in less than a year. Somebody suggested it was a "bad" firmware on that model, but I switched to WD and haven't had a single failure since.
- BonoboIO 2y agoExos Series? I never had problems with Seagate Exos or WD Red or even the WD shucked White Reds. It’s interesting how different the experiences are, some swear by a specific brand.
- buckle8017 2y agoUnfortunately using all the same type of drive in any kinda of system is a recipe for disaster. Incompatibilities between the drive firmware and the device they're in can cause problems. Subtle harmonic issues with how the drives are mounted, which might be fine for some drives and disastrous for others. I've always found the best strategy with mechanical hard drives is to have various brands and models in the same device on RAID.
- zie 2y agoThis. I don't care about brand or model or anything. I care about interface/speed requirements and then $/size. Drives are interchangeable for a reason. :)
- ganoushoreilly 2y agoDid you purchase them all at the same time from the same store? I've had a batch of SSDs fail from the same vendor / mfg timeframe. I started ordering a couple here and there form different vendors where possible. So far i've been lucky to get drives that aren't from the same batches. I tend to buy Exos from seagate and WD gold though so there's a bit of a premium tacked on.
- sys32768 2y agoNo, that's the weird thing. Even the RMA models were failing. But sure enough, it wasn't just some incompatibility with the NAS because I tested them on PCs to confirm they were failing, and they were.
- jdhawk 2y agoI wish there was a way to underspin (RPM) some of these drives to lower noise for non-datacenter use - the quest for the Largest "Quiet" drive - is a hard one. It would be cool if these could downshift into <5000RPM mode and run much quieter.
- zootboy 2y agoI wonder if that's even technically possible these days. Given the fact that the heads have to float on the moving air (or helium) produced by the spinning platter, coupled with modern data densities probably making the float distance tolerance quite small, there might be a very narrow band of rotation speeds that the heads require to correctly operate.
- jdhawk 2y agoyeah - valid point. it seems like they all moved past 5400RPM at the 14TB level.
- ecliptik 2y agoIt's not a best practice, but the last 10 years I've run my home server with a smaller faster drive for the OS and a single larger disk for bulk storage that I choose using Backblaze Drive Stats. None of have failed yet (fingers-crossed). I really trust their methodology and it's an extremely valuable resource for me as a consumer. My most recent drive is a WDC WUH722222ALE6L4 22TiB, and looking at the stats (albeit only a few months of data), and overall trend of WDC, in this report gives me peace of mind that it should be fine for the next few years until it's time for the cycle to repeat.
- kridsdale1 2y agoNo RAID 0 for the bulk storage? What’s your disaster plan?
- ecliptik 2y agorestic + rclone to cloud storage for data I care about, the majority of the data can easily be replaced if needed.
- manosyja 2y agoThat’s exactly how I do it.
- SteveNuts 2y agoSurely you mean RAID 1? Or 5, 6, 10 perhaps?
- BSDobelix 2y agoDisaster-plan is always backup (away from location) or out-of-house replication, raid is NOT a backup but a part of a system to keep uptime high and hands-on low (like redundant power and supply) Disaster = Your DC or Cellar is flooded or burned down ;)
- qskousen 2y agoI'm sure you're aware but consider putting another drive in for some flavor of RAID, it's a lot easier to rebuild a RAID than to rebuild data usually! Edit: By "some flavor" I mean hardware or software.
- Macha 2y agoMy home NAS drives are currently hitting the 5 years mark. So far I'm at no failures, but I'm considering if it's time to upgrade/replace. What I have is 5 x 4TB pre-SMR WD Reds (which are now called the WD Red Pro line I guess). Capacity wise I've got them setup in a RAID 6, which gives me 12TB of usable capacity, of which I currently use about 7.5TB. I'm basically mulling between going as-is to SSDs in a similar 5x4TB configuration, or just going for 20TB hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration and a pair of 4TB SATA SSDs in a RAID 1 for use cases that need better-than-HDD performance. These figures indicate Seagate is improving in reliability, which might be worth considering this time given WD's actions in the time since my last purchase, but on the other hand I'd basically sworn off Seagate after a wave of drives in the mid-2010s with a near 100% failure rate within 5 years.
- bloopernova 2y agoGoogle sells 2TB of space on Google drive for $10/month. I'm looking to move my data elsewhere. Can anyone recommend a European based alternative with a roughly similar cost?
- pranaysy 2y agoHetzner!
- staindk 2y agoOneDrive space (through MS365 single or family licence) works out much cheaper in my country. I'm sure in the EU it is GDPR-compliant. YMMV but OneDrive has been improving a lot. Their web photos browsing is comparable to Google Photos these days.
- homarp 2y agolinux sync works?
- MrDrMcCoy 2y agoIt's supported by rclone.
- ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago> OneDrive > I'm sure in the EU it is GDPR-compliant. Sure ain't, especially not in Germany with the BDS.
- guerby 2y agohetzner storage box $4 per month for 1 TB and $13 for 5 TB.
- bloopernova 2y agoGood lord it even supports BorgBackup. Thank you very much!
- vednig 2y agoBlackblaze is one of the most respected services in Storage industry, they've kept gaining my respect even after I launched my own cloud storage solution.
- atYevP 2y agoYev from Backblaze here -> thank you so much!
- loeg 2y agoHard to argue with those WDC/Toshiba numbers. Seagate's are just embarrassing in contrast. (HGST drives -- now WDC -- were great, but those are legacy drives. It's been part of WD for some time. The new models are WDC branded.)
- RachelF 2y ago...and many used Seagate drives have been resold as new in the last 3 years. They were used for crypto mining and then had their SMART parameters wiped back to "new" 0 hours usage. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Hard-disk-fraud-Increasing-evidence-of-origin-in-China-10269059.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Hard-disk-fraud-Increasing-evid...
- loeg 2y agoSure, but it's hard to blame that on Seagate. The AFR is their fault.
- michaelt 2y agoIt's not Seagate's fault, but it would behove them to clamp down on such activity by authorised resellers. After all, it's not just the buyer getting ripped off; it's also Seagate. A customer paid for a brand new Seagate drive and Seagate didn't see a penny of it.
- loeg 2y agoYes. Nothing would lead me to believe Seagate isn't fervently working to shut down fraudulent resellers behind the scenes.
- numpad0 2y agoSeagate has always been the "you get what you pay for" && high replacement availability option, at least since the Thai flood and ST3000DM001 days - they kept shipping drives. It was always HGST > Toshiba > Seagate in both price and MTBF, with WD somewhere in between.
- bhouston 2y agoBased on the data, it seems they have 4.4 petabytes of storage under management. Neat. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1E4MS84SbSwWILVPAgeIipltAo6BM3yJeR1w6qRyZj7w/edit?gid=0#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1E4MS84SbSwWILVPAgeIi...
- remram 2y agoNowadays you can get a petabyte in a single machine (50 drives 20TB each).
- malfist 2y agoOut of curiosity, what server cases can actually accommodate 50 drives?
- walrus01 2y agoIf you google "supermicro 72 drive server" it's definitely a thing that exists, but these use double-length drive trays where each tray contains two drives. Meaning that you need a "whole machine can go down" software architecture of redundancy at a very large scale to make these useful, since pulling one tray to replace a drive will take two drives offline. More realistically the normal version of the same supermicro chassis which has 1 drive per tray is 36 drives in 1 server. There are other less publicly well known things with 72 to 96 drive trays in a single 'server' which are manufactured by taiwanese OEMs for large scale operators. The supermicro is just the best visual example I can think of right now with a well laid out marketing webpage. edit: some photos https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-ssg-6047r-e1r72l-72x-35-drive-4u-storage-server-released/ https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-ssg-6047r-e1r72l-72x...
- Lammy 2y ago> Meaning that you need a "whole machine can go down" software architecture of redundancy at a very large scale to make these useful Also some serious cooling to avoid the drives in the front cooking the drives in the back (assuming front-to-back airflow).
- quintin 2y agoIt continues to surprise me why Backblaze still trades at a fraction of its peak COVID share price. A well-managed company with solid fundamentals, strong IP and growing.
- devoutsalsa 2y agoBecause they are bleeding money and they must sell stock to stay in business. Cool product, but I personally don’t want to buy something that doesn’t turn a profit and has negative free cash flow.
- crazygringo 2y agoI feel very confident that in 30 years AWS, Azure and Google Cloud will still be operating and profitable. I think there's a very small chance that Backblaze will be. Nothing against them, but it's virtually impossible to compete long-term with the economies of scale, bundling and network effects of the major cloud providers.
- manquer 2y agoCloud providers AWS in particular uses storage and transfer pricing as means of lock-in to other products , they can never be cost competitive to Backblaze , they has a thriving prosumer business . I don’t think it is going anywhere.
- ww520 2y agoAfter couple failed hard disks in my old NVR, I’ve come to realize heat is the biggest enemy of hard disks. The NVR had to provide power to the POE cameras, ran video transcoding, and constantly writing to the disk. It generated a lot of heat. The disks were probably warped due to the heat and the disk heads crashed onto the surface, causing data loss. For my new NVR, the POE power supply is separated out to a powered switch, the newer CPU can do hardware video encoding, and I used SSD for first stage writing and hard disks as secondary backup. The heat has gone way down. So far things have run well. I know constant rewriting on SSD is bad, but the MTBF of SSD indicates it will be a number of years before failing. It’s an acceptable risk.
- walrus01 2y agoThat seems like a very poor chassis design on the part of the NVR manufacturer. The average modern 3.5" high capacity HDD doesn't generate that much heat. Even 'datacenter' HGST drives average around 5.5W and will top out at 7.8W TDP under maximum stress. Designing a case that uses relatively low rpm, quiet, 120 or 140mm 12VDC fans to pull air through it and cool six or eight hard drives isn't that difficult. In a midtower desktop PC case set up as a NAS with a low wattage CPU, used as a NAS, a single 140mm fan at the rear sucking air from front-to-back is often quite enough to cool eight 3.5" HDD. But equipment designers keep trying to stuff things into spaces that are too small and use inadequate ventilation.
- ww520 2y agoIn a combination of heat, the POE cameras draw quite a bit of power, the video transcoding, and then the constant disk writes, all in a small slim case. It ran very hot during summer.
- userbinator 2y agoThat ST12000NM0007 is a little worrying. Looks like there are still pretty significant differences between manufacturers.
- pinoy420 2y agoThis is such a fantastic piece of research. Thank you if you are reading. I wish amazon and Microsoft did similar
- atYevP 2y agoYev from Backblaze here -> you're welcome! Glad you like and we also wish they did! That's one of the reasons we started doing it, we wanted to know :D
- Melatonic 2y agoTrue enterprise drives ftw - even Seagate usually makes some very reliable ones. They also tend to be a little faster. Some people have complained about noise but I have never noticed. They are noticeable much heavier in hand (and supposedly most use dual bearings). Combined with selecting based on Backblazes statistics I have had no HDD failures in years
- SirMaster 2y agoOne of these blogs literally told us that enterprise drives were no better. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/enterprise-drive-reliability/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/enterprise-drive-reliability/
- tredre3 2y agoI'm not sure I follow you, are you really saying that your choice of Seagate was based on Backblaze's statistics? Maybe I'm missing something but aren't they the overall least reliable brand in their tables?
- Melatonic 2y agoThe drive with the lowest fail rate at the above link looks like it is a Seagate enterprise drive (ST16000NM002J)
- bigtimesink 2y agoI used to think these were interesting and used them to inform my next HDD purchase. I realized I only used them to pick a recently reliable brand, we're down to three, and the stats are mostly old models, so the main use is if you're buying a used drive from the same batch that Backblaze happens to have also used. Buy two from different vendors and RAID or do regular off-site backups.
- Kab1r 2y ago> RAID or do regular off-site backups. RAID is not a backup! Do both.
- lotharcable2 2y agoMirrored raid is good. Other raid levels are of dubious value nowadays. Ideally you use "software raid" or file system with the capabilities do scrubbing and repair to detect bitrot. Or have some sort of hardware solution that can do the same and notify the OS of the error correction. And, as always, Raid-type solutions mostly exist to improve availability. Backups are something else entirely. Nothing beats having lots of copies in different places.
- mastax 2y agoI bought a bunch of 28 TB Seagate Exos drives refurbished for not that much money. I still can't believe that 28TB drives are even possible.
- code_biologist 2y agoSaw this recently: "Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42864788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42864788 Check your FARM logs. It sounds like people who were using the drives to mine the Chia cryptocurrency are dumping large capacity drives as Chia's value has fallen.
- textlapse 2y agoGreat to see this every year. Although a minor pet peeve (knowing this is free): I would have loved to see a 'in-use meter' in addition to just 'the drive was kept powered on'. AFR doesn't make sense for a HDD unless we know how long and how frequently the drives were being used (# of reads/writes or bytes/s). If all of them had a 99% usage through the entire year - then sure (really?).
- MrDrMcCoy 2y agoProbably can't say too much, but I know that the I/O on these drives stays pretty consistently high. Enough so that Backblaze has to consider staying on smaller drives due to rebuild times and the fact that denser drives really don't stand up to as much abuse.
- frontierkodiak 2y agoI've owned 17 Seagate ST12000NM001G (12TB SATA) drives over the last 24mos in a big raidz3 pool. My personal stats, grouping by the first 3-4 SN characters: - 5/8 ZLW2s failed - 1/4 ZL2s - 1/2 ZS80 - 0/2 ZTN - 0/1 ZLW0 All drives were refurbs. Two from the Seagate eBay store, all others from ServerPartDeals. 7/15 of the drives I purchases from ServerPartDeals have failed, at least four of those failures have been within 6 weeks of installation. I originally used the Backblaze when selecting the drive I'd build my storage pool around. Every time the updated stats pop up in my inbox, I check out the table and double-check that my drives are in fact the 001Gs.. the drives that Backblaze reports has having 0.99% AFR.. I guess the lesson is that YMMV.
- MathiasPius 2y agoI think impact can have a big influence on mechanical hard drive longevity, so it could be that the way the ServerPartDeals drives were sourced, handled or shipped compromised them.
- lofaszvanitt 2y ago"All drives were refurbs." refurbs have terrible reliability... They offer 5 year warranties, yet the replacements they send back have terrible quality......
- russelg 2y agoYeah, I don't think that Backblaze are buying refurbs...
- amelius 2y agoConsidering the bathtub curve, does this table mark a drive as bad if it fails in the first (e.g.) week? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoIt’s a bit odd. HGST always fares very well, in Backblaze stats, but I have actually had issues, over the years, in my own setup (Synology frames). Seagate has usually fared better. Might be the model of the drives. I use 4TB ones.
- Emma_Rose 2y ago[dead]
- tanelpoder 2y agoRelated - about a year ago or so, I read about a firmware related problem with some vendors SSDs. It was triggered by some uptime counter reaching (overflowing?) some threshold and the SSD just bricked itself. It’s interesting because you could carefully spread out disks from the same batch across many different servers, but if you deployed & started up all these new servers around the same time, the buggy disks in them later all failed around the same time too, when their time was up…
- viggity 2y agoPolite data viz recommendation: don't use black gridlines in your tables. Make them a light gray. The gridlines do provide information (the organization of the data), but the more important information is the values. I'd also right align the drive failures so you can scan/compare consistently.