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Backblaze Drive Stats for 2025
- metadat 9mo agoSeagate continues the tradition of having the highest failure rates of any manufacturer, on average. Why is that?
- lycan1917 9mo agoAs explained at https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2025 https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-..., a large proportion of Backblaze's Seagate inventory are rather old drives for a datacenter (now 5-9 years in service), so a high failure rate is expected.
- metadat 9mo agoI have quantum fireball from 2000, so 26 years old, still going strong. 5 years doesn't seem that long for a drive that cost hundreds of dollars! Persistence is the point. Just wondering why Seagate seems like the bottom of the barrel in the longevity department. Western Digital drives seem to fail a lot less frequently on average in this dataset and in my life experience. To Seagate's credit, I do have 8x24TB drives that have been working fine for the past 4 years. Hopefully can last a few more until the compute hardware shortages pass.
- dpacmittal 9mo agoThat's a brand I haven't heard of in a long time. I had a 8gb HDD from the brand in 2000 until my sister kicked the computer case out of frustration which ended up shorting some chips on the drive. I mourned the loss of my music collection for quite a long time.
- hypercube33 9mo agoWell, I have a 200mb maxtor IDE works just fine to this day.
- ProllyInfamous 9mo agoThe classic Deathstars™ ["Deskstar"]
- ProllyInfamous 9mo agoI used a 1.2gb Fireball for my main drive around that era — it is so comically loud!.
- rasz 9mo agoOnly expected if its Seagate. Backblaze Hitachi drives had miniscule failure rates thru their whole life cycle.
- WarOnPrivacy 9mo agoI have two particularly notorious Seagate periods: Seagate bought Conner when Conner had released several models w/ leaky seals. Bad sectors started at the outer edge of the platters and grew inward. We had a lot of these drives out there and Seagate refused to honor Conner's drive warranties. The 7200.10 series had super high failure rates. I wound up replacing every one in my care, within 2 years. The 7200.11 drives weren't much better. I think the last Seagate lines I truly trusted were the ST series of MFM and RLL drives.
- gethly 9mo ago"back in my day", seagate was "the shit". only much later, hitachi drives came to be popular and wd, sort of.
- burnt-resistor 9mo agoBy Hitachi, you mean IBM Ultrastar. IBM drives tended to be the best.
- ThePowerOfFuet 9mo ago>IBM drives tended to be the best. The IBM Deskstar 75GXP entirely earned its nickname of Deathstar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_fa...
- burnt-resistor 9mo agoI never touched those because IBM was at a low point and their retail PC stuff tended to suck. Always enterprise gear like Ultrastar U2W drives. https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/overview-182gb-and-91gb-10000-rpm-wide-ultra2-scsi-hard-disk-drives https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/overview-182gb-and-91gb-10... IBM San Jose/Almaden is where HDD tech originally came from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_305_RAMAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_305_RAMAC
- gethly 9mo agonope. i don't even think ibm were being widely sold at all. ultrastar rings a bell, somewhat, but definitely not ibm hard drives. and i'm talking early 2000s here.
- eqvinox 9mo agoIt actually looks like they're getting better, if the changes from last year to this year are any indication.
- adrian_b 9mo agoI do not know, but the last time when I have bought a Seagate HDD, I had a very nasty and unpleasant surprise. Last year I have bought a 22 TB Seagate Expansion Desktop external HDD, because it was cheaper than the other 22 or 24 TB HDDs available at that time. I had read carefully its datasheet before buying and there was nothing suspicious there, so I assumed that it must be cheaper just because it is a slow HDD. I did not care about the speed, it was for storing data archives infrequently accessed. Only after receiving it I discovered what was not said in the datasheet, that this Seagate HDD does not support S.M.A.R.T., so there is no way to test it to see if it works OK and there is no way to discover when errors have happened, e.g. to see when the HDD becomes too old, so you need to migrate your data. I have never imagined that in 2025 it is possible to buy a HDD that does not support S.M.A.R.T., especially in HDDs with a capacity over 20 TB, and moreover without giving a prominent notice about such a misfeature in the datasheet. Before this, in 2024 I had bought a 24 TB Seagate SkyHawk, which had S.M.A.R.T., as expected. Since then, after the Seagate Expansion fiasco, I have bought a 22 TB external WD HDD, at the same price with the Seagate, and which has S.M.A.R.T., as it is normal. I cannot see how removing S.M.A.R.T. support can reduce costs, as it is just a firmware feature. I any case a manufacturer that removes testing and error reporting features from its products clearly does not give a s*t about data corruption and HDD failure rates.
- 1over137 9mo ago>there is no way to discover when errors have happened There is: use ZFS and scrub. But yeah, crazy that it doesn't support SMART!
- adrian_b 9mo agoEven without using ZFS (I prefer XFS as significantly faster) all the files that I store have content hash values in extended attributes, for data integrity verification (and also for data deduplication). Whenever I write that drive, after a power cycle (to be sure that the files are read from disks and not from some cache) I run a script that checks the integrity of the files, to be sure that I can remove them from elsewhere without risking data loss. With SMART-enabled drives, I usually do that only in the rare cases when a drive reports corrected errors, because I have seen cases when a drive miscorrected some errors, resulting in corrupted files. With a HDD without SMART, when the drives finds errors, but it believes to have corrected them successfully, there is no external sign that something could have gone wrong.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- binsquare 9mo agoFlash storage costs have gone way up. I wonder if backblaze's business has seen any changes given that their assets are platter drives
- dns_snek 9mo agoRetail HDD prices have also gone up ~50% over the past couple of months.
- londons_explore 9mo agoPretty sure that's cos every AI company wants to have a copy of all the worlds information stored in each of their data centers, and hard drives are the best storage medium for that. Design your training strategy carefully and you can do streaming rather than random reads from the drives and get enough performance.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- trueismywork 9mo agoIn modern storage tech, network is the i/o bottleneck, but HDD
- agumonkey 9mo agoInteresting, SSD have kind doubled.. storage used to be such a commodity item and now it's a gold rush
- alex43578 9mo agoSame with DRAM, old-node chips during the Post-COVID chip shortage, and toilet paper during COVID. Lots of things are commodities until the demand spikes.
- KronisLV 9mo agoThankfully for personal stuff there's at least the option of buying white label or recertified drives. Recently got some 1 TB ones from Datablocks as backups, did a short writeup on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/buying-some-drives-from-datablocks https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/buying-some-drives-from-datablo... (though a better post made its way on HN by someone else a while ago, too) To be honest, they mostly have 8 TB and up in stock at the moment, but the price was around 35 EUR for the 1 TB drive which is kind of insane when similar drives at local stores cost 110 EUR right now - I remember when those Seagate Barracuda drives were about 40-50 EUR brand new! For the US, there's also goHardDrive, though I haven't used them myself: https://www.goharddrive.com/category-s/69.htm https://www.goharddrive.com/category-s/69.htm I still use SSDs for boot drives, video games and also fragmented data (like Garage for something S3 compatible, which chunks the files), but for backups and longer term storage HDDs are great.
- CTDOCodebases 9mo agoMy drives have an AFR of 0.41 It looks like I picked a good vintage which is good because the same drives are approaching 2x the price today.
- burnt-resistor 9mo agoI'm still running ~40 WUH721414ALE6L4 purchased ~2020 for $110 ea. They're $320 ea now, used. I never thought I would own commodity hardware that would increase in value over time. When this AI bubble pops like dotcom 1.0, the definancialization is going to be painful.
- lofaszvanitt 9mo agoThe sad thing is that they need 330k hard drives to store a shitton of data. And there are no hard drive alternatives on the market.
- cursuve 9mo agoGenuinely curious: What would such an alternative provide to the market? Would it be cheaper, last longer, be some medium that offered different performance/longevity characteristics? There is flash storage which provides some tradeoffs with price (especially now!) and performance. Spinning disks seem to be in a sweet spot of relatively cheap adequately performant with an acceptable lifetime/failure rate for a lot of needs... What market need is missing? (Again - not trying to debate, I am genuinely curious as I am not in the storage industry at all.)
- bazodedo 9mo agoSome cheap and durable archival storage would be nice. Perhaps by storing data in grooves on ceramic discs. (Which is essentially what cds did). Though, preferably without high speed rotation, and reading more than one bit at a time by e.g. taking a picture of the surface through a microscope. How about 1 PB per disk? I was wondering why we dont have something like that. Unfortunately, it turns out that, with Blue-ray discs, we're already approaching the optics limit of what visible light (easily) gets us, and they're already cheating with multi-layer storage for the 100GB option. Thus youd need a complicated EUV or electron beam setup for smaller feature sizes. Say i want my 1PB disk in cd format. A cd has r=6cm. Thus A~=100cm^2. A/1PB= 1.25e-18m^2= 1.25 nm^2, or about 5x5 atoms per bit :/ I guess we're better off by just scaling up flash production and stacking those elements vertically. Edit: Turns out we need volumetric storage. By using a material that is transparent to the laser wavelength, by intersecting two precisely focussed beams, the local intensity suffices to absorb two photons at once (stops being transparent) allowing you to select a volumetric point to interact with. This allows a couple hundred of layers until refraction breaks our resolution.
- bayouborne 9mo ago"As of the end of 2025, Backblaze was monitoring 341,664 drives used to store data." Three hundred thousand drives. That figure seems insane. Google and AWS must have truly staggering amounts.
- anonym00se1 9mo agoSuper interesting thanks for sharing. Can y'all offer a backup plan targeted at home users with a NAS? The current two tiers either don't support that or are incredibly cost prohibitive to a random schmo who just wants his NAS backed up.