[HN Gopher] Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2025
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Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2025
Author : woliveirajr
Score : 155 points
Date : 2025-11-14 13:10 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.backblaze.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.backblaze.com)
| basilgohar wrote:
| What Backblaze is doing here is so underrated. This a large
| scale, practical, in-datacenter real data on essential hardware
| infrastructure that is available almost nowhere else, and they
| provide it, and their excellent analysis, completely for free.
|
| I miss this culture and I admire leadership that allows it to not
| only exist, but thrive. I fear the day a stockholder meeting
| occurs and someone wringing their hands see the decommissioned
| pennies they can save by limiting or stopping these reports.
| 400thecat wrote:
| is there any danger this data is biased? Everything good gets
| corrupted eventually (amazon reviews, consumer reports, ..). is
| it possible they get some kickbacks for positive reviews ?
| basilgohar wrote:
| It's always possible. But I haven't seen anything that would
| imply this to be the case so far in all the years I've been
| reading this.
| bArray wrote:
| What it buys is long-term good will. Engineers will see they
| know their stuff and suggest them as a solution for projects
| and people.
|
| That said, all it would take is for the wrong leadership to
| start cutting corners to undo all of this hard work.
| lostdog wrote:
| Backblaze stuck my email on a list, and now I get daily
| marketing spam from them. They shattered that good will with
| me very quickly.
| holysoles wrote:
| This is the main reason I use them for their S3 compatible
| storage service over their competitors. While its not
| enterprise level revenue, I still like to think it makes a
| difference.
| AnonHP wrote:
| > I fear the day a stockholder meeting occurs and someone
| wringing their hands see the decommissioned pennies they can
| save by limiting or stopping these reports.
|
| The Backblaze stock has taken a beating over the years.
| Recently I saw some news that there were issues with financial
| reporting (and fraud?). So it's anybody's guess as to what may
| happen or if the company would even be around (as it exists
| now) in the next decade.
|
| I'd guess they may already have tools in place to prepare the
| stats and charts, leaving some amount of writing as manual work
| (which could or would probably be offloaded to generative AI).
| But analyzing the reliability of drives and publishing the data
| could also be seen as a competitive advantage when comparing
| with newer companies (positive and negative).
| ISL wrote:
| For as long as Backblaze has been doing this and at this level
| of quality, I have no doubt that these reports are good for
| business.
|
| (As an anecdotal example -- I first heard about Backblaze from
| these reports many years ago and have relied on them to an
| extent in selecting new drives. I'm now a Backblaze customer.)
| emailrob wrote:
| > by limiting or stopping these reports
|
| Hopefully not, given the performance one was just newly added!
| blindriver wrote:
| Given the upcoming 2 year enterprise data shortage coming up due
| to hyperscalers, I'm curious how this will affect Backblaze.
| tempest_ wrote:
| That is SSD/Memory.
|
| These are HDDs.
| benjiro wrote:
| HDDs have also been under pressure ... There was barely a
| month ago a article here, from somebody who setup a cluster
| of like half a million, with several 1000's hdds. Just to
| store data for AI training.
|
| Not even two days ago there as a article of backlog on HDDs
| for AI. Because everybody and their grandmother wants to
| store the entire internet, out of fear that AI scraping will
| become more difficult. Aka, they are gating data. And yes,
| you can train AI easily on HDD even with their lower IOPS.
| The fact that you got a few 1000 in parallel does the trick,
| and its often bandwidth issues that hit harder.
|
| I just stockpiled a few extra 4TB NVME because i learned my
| lesson. NVME has not been dropping in prices after the
| manufacture pushed it up, and AI is going to keep eating NVME
| storage for a long time. Let alone HDD storage...
|
| Welcome to the new normal ... Crypto miners killing GPU
| prices, HDD Crypto miners, Crypto miners again back with a
| vengeance, O pandemic, everybody needs hardware... Short time
| of benefits because of over production (on NVME especially,
| manufacture cut back production) AAAAND .. here comes AI.
|
| Its something every fying year.
| sersi wrote:
| In my neck of the woods (HK), HDD price pretty much doubled
| in the last 2 months. I bought 22TB Toshiba 1 year ago at
| 30% less than what they cost now.
| zhdc1 wrote:
| Shortage -> Glut
| tempest_ wrote:
| While I find this data interesting it isnt usually very
| actionable.
|
| The skus with the lowest number immediately get bought out(if
| they are still available, which they are not always) and will
| never be available. You also always run the risk of "getting a
| bad batch" or just getting some drives that got beat up in
| shipping.
|
| Usually this data is only useful for keeping an eye on your own
| stuff and prioritizing replacements when the time comes.
|
| When buying drives I just look at the sizes I need and the
| performance then get 1/3rd from each of the manufacturers.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Yeah, usually by the time you know a specific model is or isn't
| "good" the mfg has changed production or how things are laid
| out in the products themselves. Over time, you can glean that
| some mfg have been better or worse overall than others though,
| but that's not a promise of future efforts.
|
| All the same, it's definitely cool and interesting to see. I've
| had some good and some very bad luck with storage drives over
| the years. I still think twice about Seagate drives since I had
| 6 out of 8 of their 3tb enterprise models go bad relatively
| quickly a decade and a half ago, specifically bought through
| separate vendors. I also had the first IBM Deskstar drives, the
| second died before the first could be RMA'd (raid1 isn't
| backup).
| warmwaffles wrote:
| I'm mainly looking at manufacturer and model failure rates in
| aggregate over a period of time like 6 months to determine my
| next purchases. As you pointed out SKUs with the lowest get
| slurped up and you always run the risk of bad batches.
| theanomaly wrote:
| While it's tough if you want new drives, I've found I could
| frequently get used drives on eBay that have significant
| history on Backblaze's report. Despite the increased risk from
| used drives, I've found I still end up more reliable than
| buying random new drives.
| toast0 wrote:
| Any sort of long term testing is like this. You can't know what
| the long term reliability of something is when you buy it. You
| can estimate from reliability of similar items made in the
| past, but even if you bought some of everything and kept it on
| the shelf for X years and then only used the best, the stuff
| aged on the shelf.
|
| Reports like this might help drive planning for failures. It
| might also help validate your experience if you've had a bunch
| of failures with some model and they have too.
|
| IIRC, there have been a couple models that seemed to hit a big
| bathtub curve style end of life (I think 6TB drives in
| particularl); that could be a pre-failure indicator for you if
| you have that model.
|
| Otherwise, yeah, mostly not actionable, but very nice to see
| the data.
|
| > When buying drives I just look at the sizes I need and the
| performance then get 1/3rd from each of the manufacturers.
|
| This is a good plan, you should avoid most correlated failures
| from firmware and manufacturing (although there's a lot of
| shared supply chain, so you might not avoid all correlated
| failures if some common component was made improperly during a
| long enough time period that all three drive makers would be
| using it in your purchase).
| redm wrote:
| I've been following this report for many years, but Backblaze, as
| a backup service (traditionally), has very different IO patterns
| than many users. They originally started with consumer drives,
| which we found to be far too unreliable. In my experience, the
| BER and write cycles have a dramatic impact on overall drive
| performance. The MTBF declines sharply as write cycles increase,
| both as a percentage of IO and overall IO.
|
| Backblaze changed IO patterns with B2, but that would be the key
| data for me to make this more useful: failure rate as a
| percentage of bytes read/written, etc.
| londons_explore wrote:
| My takeaway... The specific model plays a huge role in the
| failure rate.
|
| A great model has a MTBF of 250 years.
|
| A bad model might have a MTBF of just 5 years.
|
| I suspect if you had a need for reliable storage which couldn't
| be met with the usual RAID approach, buying 2nd hand drives from
| eBay of a model and batch proven to be really reliable is
| probably your best bet.
| londons_explore wrote:
| And to answer the obvious question... One usecase where you
| want reliability and can't use RAID is where you are selling a
| product that only has physical space or money for one drive -
| for example a standalone CCTV storage device.
|
| Every drive failure will lead to an unhappy customer and
| product return, so you really want the failure rate in the
| first 10 years of operation to be 1% or below. (Which none of
| the drives in this study can do).
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(page generated 2025-11-14 23:01 UTC)