[HN Gopher] Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
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Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 299 points
Date : 2025-02-11 14:55 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.backblaze.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.backblaze.com)
| comboy wrote:
| Huh, what happened to HGST?
| antithesis-nl wrote:
| They, 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 wrote:
| From that table I understand that WD are the most reliable
| nowadays. Especially 16TB models. Is my understanding
| correct?
| antithesis-nl wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| _I don 't think there have been any truly disastrous
| series in the past 10-15 years or so_
|
| ST3000DM001.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| > '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...
| neilv wrote:
| Every 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 wrote:
| Benson Leung's USB cable crusade comes to mind. Also Jim
| Gettys' coming out of seeming retirement to educate us all
| about Bufferbloat.
| bityard wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| It's worth noting that this type of marketing can also
| improves page rankings.
| devrand wrote:
| Puget 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 wrote:
| A 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&s...
|
| Edit: Adding a shoutout to the iFixIt teardowns that are also
| quite informative content:
|
| https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown
|
| Edit 2: Also Lumafield CT scans:
|
| https://www.scanofthemonth.com/
| KomoD wrote:
| TechEmpower still does them. https://github.com/TechEmpower/F
| rameworkBenchmarks/issues/95...
| nerdponx wrote:
| Jepsen (of database benchmark fame) does paid consulting work.
| zX41ZdbW wrote:
| Some examples from me:
|
| Database benchmarks: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench
| (containing 30+ databases) and the new JSON analytics
| benchmark, https://github.com/ClickHouse/JSONBench/
|
| Plus, the hardware benchmark:
| https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/hardware/ (also used by
| Phoronix).
| DecentShoes wrote:
| ...Spotify wrapped kinda?
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| They really have been great, the bar was set high!
| fyrabanks wrote:
| I almost cannot believe I've been reading these for 10 years
| now.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Remember when Seagate sponsored the /r/datahoarder subreddit
| instead of making better hard drives?
| gruez wrote:
| Source?
| KomoD wrote:
| Nope
| louwrentius wrote:
| When 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Exos 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 wrote:
| Unfortunately 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.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Did 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 wrote:
| No, 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.
| emmelaich wrote:
| What models? There's a big difference between the cheapest and
| the more pro models.
|
| That said, my four 2Tb Barracudas still going fine after many
| years (10+). One failed, replaced with a green. Big mistake,
| that failed quickly and I went back to standard Barracudas.
|
| They don't get used intensely though.
| sys32768 wrote:
| 8TB Ironwolf NAS ST8000VN004
| KPGv2 wrote:
| This will probably jinx me, but I've had so many drives, many
| purchased on the cheap from Fry's Black Friday sales when I was
| a poor university student, and the two drives I've ever had
| fail since I started buying over twenty years ago were
|
| 1. catastrophic flood in my apartment when drive was on the
| ground
|
| 2. a drive in an external enclosure on the ground that I kicked
| by mistake while it was spinning
|
| I'm glad I've never had y'all's problems.
| jdhawk wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| yeah - valid point. it seems like they all moved past 5400RPM
| at the 14TB level.
| ecliptik wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| No RAID 0 for the bulk storage? What's your disaster plan?
| ecliptik wrote:
| restic + rclone to cloud storage for data I care about, the
| majority of the data can easily be replaced if needed.
| manosyja wrote:
| That's exactly how I do it.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Surely you mean RAID 1? Or 5, 6, 10 perhaps?
| qskousen wrote:
| I'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.
| walrus01 wrote:
| RAID doesn't cover all of the scenarios as offsite backup,
| such as massive electrical power surge, fire, flood, theft or
| other things causing total destruction of the RAID array.
| Ideally you'd want a setup that has local storage redundancy
| in some form of RAID _and_ offsite backup.
| bombcar wrote:
| In fact for home users backup is WAY more important than
| RAID, because your NAS down for a (restore time) is not
| that important, but data loss is forever.
| didntcheck wrote:
| For essential personal data you're right, but a very
| common use case for a home NAS is a media server. The
| library is usually non-essential data - _annoying_ to
| lose, but not critical. Combined with its large size, it
| 's usually hard to justify a full offsite backup. RAID
| offers a cost-effective way to give it _some_ protection,
| when the alternative is nothing
| walrus01 wrote:
| For a number of people I know, they don't do any offsite
| backup of their home media server. It would not result in
| any possibly-catastrophic personal financial
| hassles/struggles/real data loss if a bunch of movies and
| music disappeared overnight.
|
| The amount of personally generated sensitive data that
| doesn't fit on a laptop's onboard storage (which should
| all be backed up offsite as well) will usually fit on
| like a 12TB RAID-1 pair, which is easier to back up than
| 40TB+ of movies.
| dharmab wrote:
| Having to restore my media server without a backup would
| cost me around a dozen hours of my time. 2 bucks a month
| to back up to Glacier with rclone's crypt backend is
| easily worth it.
| code_biologist wrote:
| How are you hitting that pricing? S3 "Glacier Deep
| Archive"?
|
| Standard S3 is $23/TB/mo. Backblaze B2 is $6/TB/mo. S3
| Glacier Instant or Flexible Retrieval is about $4/TB/mo.
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive is about $1/TB/mo.
|
| I take it you have ~2TB in deep archive? I have 5TB in
| Backblaze and I've been meaning to prune it way down.
| ipsento606 wrote:
| for the home user backing up their own data, I honestly
| think that raid has limited utility.
|
| If I have 3 disks to devote to backup, I'd rather have 1
| local copy and two remote copies, vs 1 local copy with RAID
| and 1 remote copy without.
| dgemm wrote:
| It's super useful for maintenance, for example you can
| replace and upgrade the drives in place without
| reinstalling the system.
| gruez wrote:
| >It'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.
|
| I also have multiple drives in operation in the past decade and
| didn't experience any failures. However unlike you, I didn't
| use backblaze's drive stats to inform my purchase. I just
| bought whatever was cheapest, knowing that any TCO reduction
| from higher reliability (at best, around 10%) would eaten up by
| the lack of discounts the "best" drive. That's the problem with
| n=1 anecdotes. You don't know whether nothing bad happened
| because you followed "the right advice", or you just got lucky.
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| > WDC WUH722222ALE6L4 22TiB
|
| Careful... that is 22 TB, not 22 TiB. Disk marketing still uses
| base 10. TiB is base 2.
|
| 22 TB = 20 TiB
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| Take these stats with a grain of salt.
|
| I am becoming more and more convinced that hard drive
| reliability is linked to the batch more than to the individual
| drive models themselves. Often you will read online of people
| experiencing multiple failures from drives purchased from the
| same batch.
|
| I cannot prove this because I have no idea about Blackblazes
| procurement patterns but I bought one of the better drives in
| this list (ST16000NM001G) and it failed within a year.
|
| When it comes to hard drives or storage more generally a better
| approach is protect yourself against down time with software
| raid and backups and pray that if a drive does fail it does so
| within the warranty period.
| whalesalad wrote:
| hopefully you have 2x of these drives in some kind of raid
| mirror such that if one fails, you can simply replace it and
| re-mirror. not having something like this is risky.
| Macha wrote:
| My 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.
| vednig wrote:
| Blackblaze 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.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Google 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 wrote:
| Hetzner!
| staindk wrote:
| OneDrive 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 wrote:
| linux sync works?
| guerby wrote:
| hetzner storage box $4 per month for 1 TB and $13 for 5 TB.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Good lord it even supports BorgBackup.
|
| Thank you very much!
| lukaslalinsky wrote:
| Be aware that it's just a single server. It's not
| replicated across multiple hosts like in the case of google
| drive. So you definitely want a backup of that if it's your
| primary copy.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Good point, thank you.
|
| It may actually be a good thing that it's not replicated.
| That forces me to really make sure I have a separate
| backup elsewhere.
| anotherhue wrote:
| US -> DE latency hurts though.
|
| I used them when I was in europe but migrated away after I
| came stateside.
|
| Not a problem for cold-storage/batch jobs of course.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Good to know, thank you!
| echoangle wrote:
| I'm assuming bloopernova is based in Europe, so latency
| should be fine. At least they asked for an European-based
| Hoster (although that could also theoretically be for
| privacy reasons).
| loeg wrote:
| Hard 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.)
| bhouston wrote:
| Based on the data, it seems they have 4.4 petabytes of storage
| under management. Neat.
|
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1E4MS84SbSwWILVPAgeIi...
| selectodude wrote:
| Exabytes. 4.4 exabytes.
| userbinator wrote:
| An amazing amount if you consider that 16EB is the amount of
| data a 64-bit quantity can address, and this is over a
| quarter of that.
| dekhn wrote:
| There was a dashboard where the total storage at Google was
| tracked and they had to update it from 64 bits for this
| reason... about a decade or more ago.
| echoangle wrote:
| Wow, that's a cool stat. I wonder if people will ever
| seriously use 16EB of memory in a single system and will
| need to change to a more-than-64-bit architecture or if 64
| bit is truly enough. This has ,,640k ought to be enough for
| anybody" potential (and I know he didn't say that).
| m3nu wrote:
| 4,414,142 TB = 4.4 Exabyte
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes. 4.4 petabytes wouldn't come
| anywhere near Backblaze's storage needs.
| remram wrote:
| Nowadays you can get a petabyte in a single machine (50 drives
| 20TB each).
| quintin wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Because 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.
| ww520 wrote:
| After 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 wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| That ST12000NM0007 is a little worrying. Looks like there are
| still pretty significant differences between manufacturers.
| pinoy420 wrote:
| This is such a fantastic piece of research. Thank you if you are
| reading. I wish amazon and Microsoft did similar
| Melatonic wrote:
| True 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 wrote:
| One of these blogs literally told us that enterprise drives
| were no better.
|
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/enterprise-drive-reliability/
| bigtimesink wrote:
| I 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.
| mastax wrote:
| I 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.
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