
Backblaze's Hard Drive Stats for Q2 2017 - LaSombra
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-stats-q2-2017/
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metalliqaz
I'm not a customer of Backblaze, but I really love how they publish this data
for the public. I wish more companies did this kind of thing.

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atYevP
Yev here -> Thanks, so do we! Honestly we always thought that once we
published what we see in our environment that others would follow suite, but
that hasn't quite happened yet!

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b3lvedere
Again thanks for these stats. I love them and often refer to them when people
ask for reliable harddisks, even for consumers.

I'm not a really big expert on your file system. How easy is it for you to
replace a faulty drive? Just pop it out and put in a brand new one, even if
it's other capacity and/or brand and/or model? Is firmware upgrade of
harddisks supported?

Sometimes i wonder if it's possible to make a sort of small consumer
(nas4free?) edition of the storage pod. Must be awesome to use almost any
drive and still have a reliable big nas at home.

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Klathmon
It's windows only, but storage spaces is a pretty good match for what you
describe.

There are still some rough edges, but it's overall a pretty nice setup for me.
I setup the virtual drive to require at least 2 copies of the data on the
underlying disks (but there are options for 3 copies and more I believe), and
then you can add and remove disks to the array kind of whenever you want. They
can be different speeds, sizes, whatever.

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atYevP
Yup yup! ^

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roddux
I'm glad to see that HGST have the lowest failure rates across the board for
the 3rd(?) year in a row. I was concerned they'd lose their place when they
were bought by Western Digital.

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wukerplank
I started buying HGST drives exclusively based on the Backblaze reports. Not a
single failed drive (out of 8) failed on me so far.

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symfoniq
Ditto. My new NAS has HGST drives because of Backblaze.

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atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> Saw this go off in my twitter feed, I'll be here
for any questions if you have them.

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colinthompson
Big Backblaze fan. You guys have saved me a couple critical times!

I'm curious if your guys' view on NAS options is evolving at all?

My interest is this:

Here at Pixar we have several folks who I'd call "lazy power users" at home.
Folks like us are familiar with computers, and we want a strong home network,
but want to spend as little time as possible sysadmin-ing the thing. That
generally means powerful, easy to manage wifi, proper firewalls, etc.....and
networked storage/sharing & backup of all the family computers, from personal
machines to spouse and kid setups.

For the circles I run in, this is a fairly common case, and no single service
seems to fit the bill.

Backblaze seems so close (especially WRT "it just works"). If it could offer a
"Home backup solution" as a service...oh man, I know of at least a hundred
people who would sign up in a heartbeat.

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brianwski
> I'm curious if your guys' view on NAS options is evolving at all?

Our Backblaze "B2" product line was designed so that you get the exact same
cost of storage of the online backup product line but you were free to write
ANY policy you like (such as backup NAS boxes). Developers can use these APIs:
[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/) And
if you are a "lazy power user" who wants something that just works, maybe
check out one of these 3rd party tools:
[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html)

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eltoozero
> I'm curious if your guys' view on NAS options is evolving at all?

It's simple, Backblaze "home" doesn't work on NAS boxes, but Backblaze B2
_does_ , Synology NAS supports it natively via the Cloud Sync package.

Backblaze home is $5 flat rate for a single machine.

Backblaze B2 has granular pricing but it's like <$20 a year cheap for several
of my clients.

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criddell
They have a pricing calculator on this page:

[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-
pricing.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html)

For what I want (a fairly static 2 TB backup), it would cost around $130 /
year. If my QNAP box supports it, I think I'm going to sign up.

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userbinator
Looks like those Seagates are still disappointingly failure-prone, while HGST
remains the most reliable.

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artellectual
Backblaze won me over because they publish this stuff. I'm actually working
with the backblaze b2 api now because of some stats they published earlier.

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makmanalp
I understand that backblaze probably uses spinnies all around, but would love
to see an SSD version of this!

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hinkley
These guys need an Internet tip jar.

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Danihan
It's called, "using their service."

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atYevP
Yes, there's also that :D

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yeukhon
HGST continues to be the most reliable HDD. I am not surprised but I hope WD
doesn't fuck it up. Lenovo bought IBM X-series , while that continues to
perform well, I have little confident in Lenovo and its commitment.

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fenwick67
Wow, what's the deal with Seagate's 4TB drives failing so often?

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userbinator
Seagate's recent history shows they haven't been great at producing reliable
drives:

[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2017/01/Al...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2017/01/All-thru-Q4-2016-Failure-Rates.jpg)

Notice the rows where the number of failures is higher than the number of
drives. That means the replacements failed too.

Edit: the 3TB Seagate is apparently infamous enough to have its own Wiki page:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001)

Only the "large" Seagates (6TB and above) seem to be doing OK.

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Danihan
Impressive performance by HGST..

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azureel
Although WD bought HGST [1], it is interesting WD performs worse than them.

[1] [https://www.wdc.com/about-wd/newsroom/announcements/wdc-
acqu...](https://www.wdc.com/about-wd/newsroom/announcements/wdc-acquires-
hgst.html)

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rkuykendall-com
It makes sense, right? Keep selling decent quality WD branded drives to
consumers who don't care for best-in-industry MTTF, often in external
enclosures, but buy HGST so you also get money from super nerds.

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simonh
The way Black & Decker bought deWalt.

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Max_Mustermann
They bought the Cadillac of shooting nails.

