
Backblaze Hard Drive Reliability Stats for Q3 2015 - discreditable
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-2015/
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api
Meta: There are lots of very good VPS providers around like Vultr, Digital
Ocean, Linode, etc., but none are able to compete with EC2 on the storage
front. Backblaze should partner with or even create one that leverages its
immense storage capability to provide S3 and EBS competition integrated with a
cloud offering. That would be awesome, since EC2 actually kind of sucks on the
compute and network front (slow, flaky, no IPv6).

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brianwski
Backblaze employee here. I am surprised Amazon S3 still doesn't support IPv6.
In our very first invite only beta to Backblaze B2 we don't plan to support
IPv6, but we plan to support it soon after. Maybe it is much harder for Amazon
because they have so much legacy code and we could plan for it up front?

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atYevP
Yev from Marketing here -> What do you MEAN we're not going to support it?

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brianwski
It was cut for time to market reasons from the first release. Sorry about
that.

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atYevP
I thought my department was in charge of release timing? Engineering be
damned!

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denblaze
What's my department in charge of?

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atYevP
I don't know...what department are you in?

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Rexxar
Interesting but I don't understand what "222.77%" failure rate mean for
ST1500DL003 in 2015 ? Each disk died twice !?

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atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> Not necessarily, it just means that if we had a set
of those drives and replaced them multiple times over a given period, that
number can be quite high. We're comparing the drives that failed against the
number we have spinning, not the total we've had in service.

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Rexxar
Thanks for explanation. (I would have preferred a definition "failures /
number of disk bought", but, in practice, the result is probably very similar
for all other models)

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ck2
Well that confirms my anti-seagate bias is not unjustified.

Fairly obvious somewhere in Seagate's management chain, there are people
making purposeful decisions to cut corners with quality and care in
manufacturing.

By the way, didn't Google research show that smart data is not a good
predictor of drive failure? Or was that just on SSD?

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chiph
Their failure rate has dropped quite a bit so far in 2015, so it looks like
they've made changes to correct their previous poor failure rate. Still a long
way to go to become the front-runner, but they're going in the right direction
at least.

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dplgk
I'd be surprised if they just not finally decided to improve since I have the
same feeling as ck2 due to anecdotal experience dating back to the year 2000.

