10 ms·

Very cool that Backblaze continues to post things like this. Few people have this experience. Of those who do, few (I assume) break it out to this level of deta

Very cool that Backblaze continues to post things like this. Few people have this experience. Of those who do, few (I assume) break it out to this level of detail, actionable for others. Of those who have good experience and records, most would consider it proprietary or just decide not to post. Kudos to Backblaze.

atYevP 13y ago
We're all on this crazy spinning ball together. Early on Backblaze made the decision to stay out of the hardware business (it sounded lucrative after we developed the v1 storage pod, but everyone was a software person, so we went that route), we like to pay our hardware findings forward. It's a good thing to do!
- nickff 13y ago
  I really appreciate this; as someone who has had a number of SSD and HDD failures due to lackluster manufacturers (OCZ and Seagate respectively).
- Zancarius 13y ago
  I really like this detailed write up. A certain large company in Mountain View suggested years ago that they had collected a great deal of metrics on consumer grade hard disks performing in a data center capacity, but refused to publish the data. The fact that Backblaze isn't embarrassed to share this with the rest of this gives me the warm fuzzies. Thanks for the hard work! I recently purchased a new Seagate, and I'm feeling a bit of buyer's remorse. That's not to say this article triggered the feeling completely (though it did push me over the edge). Taking this information and the knowledge that recent model Barracudas appear to have aggressive APM that loads/unloads the heads after a minute or so of inactivity (unless disabled, but it doesn't persist between reboots) AND seems to borrow from laptop-grade design... I think I'd be better off replacing it. Again. ;) I wonder if the poor longevity of Seagate drives is due to changes in quality control or design? I have older ones that don't utilize the APM load/unload features and are still running fine after many years. Then again, they were also pre-flood drives. I'd also be curious to know if there's a correlation with where the drive was manufactured and its survival rate, though I suspect that might be a much more difficult metric to collect.
  - mturmon 13y ago
    Yes! To my knowledge, this is the first large-scale drive reliability study that names manufacturers. The study you mentioned by that certain large company was tantalizing, because it also found large differences between manufacturers, but did not name them. The relative insensitivity to temperature (<= 40C or so IIRC) they found was helpful, however.
    - Zancarius 13y ago
      True. I remember when that study was first posted that it did have curious metrics that were surprising in their own right, but it was disappointing that nothing was correlated by manufacturer. I can understand why that might have been the case. The potential for litigation would have been enormous. ;) From my perspective (speaking as a consumer), it's more useful to have information about the relative quality of each and their tradeoffs. AFAIK, Seagate produces among the fastest mechanical drives on the market, but it appears you exchange longevity for speed...
  - AceJohnny2 13y ago
    > A certain large company in Mountain View suggested years ago that they had collected a great deal of metrics on consumer grade hard disks performing in a data center capacity, but refused to publish the data. They did in 2007: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co... (first result of a search for "google hard drive report")
    - isomorphic 13y ago
      That report does not have data about individual manufacturers. Perhaps Google considered that to be lawsuit bait, or perhaps they considered it to be proprietary. Either way Backblaze's post has actionable information about which manufacturer to buy with respect to reliability trade-offs. Google's report does not.
      - Zancarius 13y ago
- newman314 13y ago
  It would be great if you could list power consumption numbers too next time. For me, that's also a big consideration for something (NAS) that is on 24/7 in the house.
  - atYevP 13y ago
    Yev from Backblaze here -> Unfortunately we don't really have any publishable stats on that quite yet, but I can say that we prefer low-power drives so that we can fit more of them in to the racks and not go over power-limits.
- thaumaturgy 13y ago
  Just wanna say, there are a bunch of little businesses, like mine, that really depend on writeups like yours when making suggestions to customers. So, thank you. We just had a spate of bad Seagate drives come through our shop. The drives should be under warranty but Seagate's making it a hassle. Some of them were less than six months old. Your writeup combined with the recent trouble means that we're dropping Seagate for our preferred HD brand.
  - atYevP 13y ago
    You're welcome! We love sharing information, and if it can't have a direct impact on our business, there's no good reason not to do it. A rising tide floats all ships! Hopefully you can find a decent substitute for the Seagates you're recommending. And if you need to recommend an online backup service, I can suggest a good one ;-)
    - thaumaturgy 13y ago
      We have actually set up a couple of clients with Backblaze. :-) I've been following your guys' progress since early on.
      - atYevP 13y ago
        Awesome! That's what we I like to hear :)
  - Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
    It's really annoying to find out that drive went dead in few months and then it happens with the replacement drives too. Especially on laptops with only one drive. Of course backups allow you to restore key data but you'll still have to setup the system. I got series of three Seagate failures and got really tired of it. Of course all non important data wasn't backed up do it was an extra annoyance.
dspillett 13y ago
I suppose it has an indirect benefits to Backblaze too. For a start the publishing of this useful information brings them to our attention (or refreshed our existing memory of the existence of their services) in a positive manner, and publishing honest information drive reliability might make the manufacturers case that little bit more about the overall quality of their consumer grade hardware (which means we all, including Backblaze, get better products to use).
- atYevP 13y ago
  Yes, if things get more reliable without going up in cost, we are happy. Though, it's true that the exposure is nice too.
  - dspillett 13y ago
    Best way to get good attention from a techie audience IMO: provide useful information with enough background data that we can to a certai extent verify how you've derived your assertions. You've been useful to us while proving you know what you are talking about in your chosen domain, so on two counts we are more likely to trust you than the next fellow if we need services like those you are offering. And you've done the above without ramming your services into our faces in the agressive manner many a marketting manager might ill-advisidly suggest.
    - atYevP 13y ago
      We certainly want all of you as customers, but the truth is, there's a time and a place for overt marketing. Covert marketing is so much more interesting, it's stealthy! Plus the discussion sometimes leads to ideas that we use and better our product and storage pod design. It's a win/win and we absolutely love it. We're glad you're enjoying the write-ups as well!
adventured 13y ago
This is also excellent PR and attention acquisition. I've referred backblaze as a possible option to look into for friends looking for backup solutions on more than one occasion just due to being reminded about their existence from posts like this (and I've never used them personally).
- atYevP 13y ago
  Who could say no to some extra exposure? Plus we feel good about sharing this type of stuff. Not many other folks seem to be willing to do it, we can't fathom why. The discussions around it alone are interesting at the very least.
- gatehouse 13y ago
  Yeah, I've always been disappointed at the lack of statistical information that hosts provide about drive failures, especially failure correlation in RAID situations. When I'm trying to price out some servers on a typical bare metal host's website it is hard to evaluate different configurations, and they are the ones that have the most real-world information, sitting in their support system. Very few publish this kind of info, so I really appreciate the efforts of Backblaze.
  - atYevP 13y ago
    It might because folks are afraid that their partners won't sell them drives. You know, if you're working directly with Hitachi or WD or Seagate and you publish stats saying they aren't great, they don't have much incentive to continue working with you, or at least not as cheerfully. Since we buy off-the-shelf drives from distributors and online, we don't really feel the the heat that much. We'd love to work directly with the manufacturers, but the minimum orders (over 10,000 drives) are not really feasible for us.
- Encosia 13y ago
  Definitely. I just downloaded it to evaluate as a replacement for Mozy, to ultimately consider evaluating it as a replacement for Mozy Pro for one of my clients.
- 13y ago

atYevP 13y ago

We're all on this crazy spinning ball together. Early on Backblaze made the decision to stay out of the hardware business (it sounded lucrative after we developed the v1 storage pod, but everyone was a software person, so we went that route), we like to pay our hardware findings forward. It's a good thing to do!

nickff 13y ago
I really appreciate this; as someone who has had a number of SSD and HDD failures due to lackluster manufacturers (OCZ and Seagate respectively).
Zancarius 13y ago
I really like this detailed write up. A certain large company in Mountain View suggested years ago that they had collected a great deal of metrics on consumer grade hard disks performing in a data center capacity, but refused to publish the data. The fact that Backblaze isn't embarrassed to share this with the rest of this gives me the warm fuzzies. Thanks for the hard work! I recently purchased a new Seagate, and I'm feeling a bit of buyer's remorse. That's not to say this article triggered the feeling completely (though it did push me over the edge). Taking this information and the knowledge that recent model Barracudas appear to have aggressive APM that loads/unloads the heads after a minute or so of inactivity (unless disabled, but it doesn't persist between reboots) AND seems to borrow from laptop-grade design... I think I'd be better off replacing it. Again. ;) I wonder if the poor longevity of Seagate drives is due to changes in quality control or design? I have older ones that don't utilize the APM load/unload features and are still running fine after many years. Then again, they were also pre-flood drives. I'd also be curious to know if there's a correlation with where the drive was manufactured and its survival rate, though I suspect that might be a much more difficult metric to collect.
- mturmon 13y ago
  Yes! To my knowledge, this is the first large-scale drive reliability study that names manufacturers. The study you mentioned by that certain large company was tantalizing, because it also found large differences between manufacturers, but did not name them. The relative insensitivity to temperature (<= 40C or so IIRC) they found was helpful, however.
  - Zancarius 13y ago
    True. I remember when that study was first posted that it did have curious metrics that were surprising in their own right, but it was disappointing that nothing was correlated by manufacturer. I can understand why that might have been the case. The potential for litigation would have been enormous. ;) From my perspective (speaking as a consumer), it's more useful to have information about the relative quality of each and their tradeoffs. AFAIK, Seagate produces among the fastest mechanical drives on the market, but it appears you exchange longevity for speed...
- AceJohnny2 13y ago
  > A certain large company in Mountain View suggested years ago that they had collected a great deal of metrics on consumer grade hard disks performing in a data center capacity, but refused to publish the data. They did in 2007: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co... (first result of a search for "google hard drive report")
  - isomorphic 13y ago
    That report does not have data about individual manufacturers. Perhaps Google considered that to be lawsuit bait, or perhaps they considered it to be proprietary. Either way Backblaze's post has actionable information about which manufacturer to buy with respect to reliability trade-offs. Google's report does not.
    - Zancarius 13y ago
newman314 13y ago
It would be great if you could list power consumption numbers too next time. For me, that's also a big consideration for something (NAS) that is on 24/7 in the house.
- atYevP 13y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> Unfortunately we don't really have any publishable stats on that quite yet, but I can say that we prefer low-power drives so that we can fit more of them in to the racks and not go over power-limits.
thaumaturgy 13y ago
Just wanna say, there are a bunch of little businesses, like mine, that really depend on writeups like yours when making suggestions to customers. So, thank you. We just had a spate of bad Seagate drives come through our shop. The drives should be under warranty but Seagate's making it a hassle. Some of them were less than six months old. Your writeup combined with the recent trouble means that we're dropping Seagate for our preferred HD brand.
- atYevP 13y ago
  You're welcome! We love sharing information, and if it can't have a direct impact on our business, there's no good reason not to do it. A rising tide floats all ships! Hopefully you can find a decent substitute for the Seagates you're recommending. And if you need to recommend an online backup service, I can suggest a good one ;-)
  - thaumaturgy 13y ago
    We have actually set up a couple of clients with Backblaze. :-) I've been following your guys' progress since early on.
    - atYevP 13y ago
      Awesome! That's what we I like to hear :)
- Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
  It's really annoying to find out that drive went dead in few months and then it happens with the replacement drives too. Especially on laptops with only one drive. Of course backups allow you to restore key data but you'll still have to setup the system. I got series of three Seagate failures and got really tired of it. Of course all non important data wasn't backed up do it was an extra annoyance.

dspillett 13y ago

I suppose it has an indirect benefits to Backblaze too. For a start the publishing of this useful information brings them to our attention (or refreshed our existing memory of the existence of their services) in a positive manner, and publishing honest information drive reliability might make the manufacturers case that little bit more about the overall quality of their consumer grade hardware (which means we all, including Backblaze, get better products to use).

atYevP 13y ago
Yes, if things get more reliable without going up in cost, we are happy. Though, it's true that the exposure is nice too.
- dspillett 13y ago
  Best way to get good attention from a techie audience IMO: provide useful information with enough background data that we can to a certai extent verify how you've derived your assertions. You've been useful to us while proving you know what you are talking about in your chosen domain, so on two counts we are more likely to trust you than the next fellow if we need services like those you are offering. And you've done the above without ramming your services into our faces in the agressive manner many a marketting manager might ill-advisidly suggest.
  - atYevP 13y ago
    We certainly want all of you as customers, but the truth is, there's a time and a place for overt marketing. Covert marketing is so much more interesting, it's stealthy! Plus the discussion sometimes leads to ideas that we use and better our product and storage pod design. It's a win/win and we absolutely love it. We're glad you're enjoying the write-ups as well!

adventured 13y ago

This is also excellent PR and attention acquisition. I've referred backblaze as a possible option to look into for friends looking for backup solutions on more than one occasion just due to being reminded about their existence from posts like this (and I've never used them personally).

atYevP 13y ago
Who could say no to some extra exposure? Plus we feel good about sharing this type of stuff. Not many other folks seem to be willing to do it, we can't fathom why. The discussions around it alone are interesting at the very least.
gatehouse 13y ago
Yeah, I've always been disappointed at the lack of statistical information that hosts provide about drive failures, especially failure correlation in RAID situations. When I'm trying to price out some servers on a typical bare metal host's website it is hard to evaluate different configurations, and they are the ones that have the most real-world information, sitting in their support system. Very few publish this kind of info, so I really appreciate the efforts of Backblaze.
- atYevP 13y ago
  It might because folks are afraid that their partners won't sell them drives. You know, if you're working directly with Hitachi or WD or Seagate and you publish stats saying they aren't great, they don't have much incentive to continue working with you, or at least not as cheerfully. Since we buy off-the-shelf drives from distributors and online, we don't really feel the the heat that much. We'd love to work directly with the manufacturers, but the minimum orders (over 10,000 drives) are not really feasible for us.
Encosia 13y ago
Definitely. I just downloaded it to evaluate as a replacement for Mozy, to ultimately consider evaluating it as a replacement for Mozy Pro for one of my clients.
13y ago