Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

I almost cannot believe I've been reading these for 10 years now.

They really have been great, the bar was set high!

Exabytes. 4.4 exabytes.

4,414,142 TB = 4.4 Exabyte

>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.

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.

No RAID 0 for the bulk storage? What’s your disaster plan?

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).

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/

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.

Jepsen (of database benchmark fame) does paid consulting work.

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.

Benson Leung's USB cable crusade comes to mind. Also Jim Gettys' coming out of seeming retirement to educate us all about Bufferbloat.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

hetzner storage box $4 per month for 1 TB and $13 for 5 TB.

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.

Hetzner!