
Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q2 2019 - LaSombra
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/
======
linsomniac
I used to run a small hosting service and we standardized on Ultrastar disks.
We would regularly have drives fall out of the RAID arrays, but when we ran
badblocks on them to verify they were having problems they would always show
up as good. After we put them back in production, they would always be happy
from that point.

So we started going on the theory that there were some marginal parts of the
disk during manufacture, and exercising them would allow them to be remapped
to good parts of the disk. Once we started including "badblocks -svw -p 5" in
the burnin procedure, our drive failure rates dropped to basically 0.

I wonder if backblaze does anything similar to provision drives.

Recently I replaced some drives in our old Dell R720 servers (5 years old).
They were showing media errors over several months but never went degraded.
During the replacement, each server had another drive fail. So I ran badblocks
on the RAID arrays over the weekend, just to make sure any other marginal
drives or sectors had an opportunity to remap. No other drive failures.

Aside: I didn't lose any data, the arrays never went FAIL, but also I had
migrated all our services off these machines. Love virtualization!

~~~
brianwski
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> I wonder if Backblaze does anything similar to provision drives.

We do different things for different drives, but ALWAYS have a "burn in"
period for new vaults (group of 20 computers that files are Reed-Solomon
encoded across) that come online.

When I say "different things", when we deployed a vault full of recent Toshiba
(?) drives it came up "too slow" and we figured out the OS block size and
drive block size wasn't lined up "by default". It "works" but essentially a
single write required reading two blocks and then writing two blocks. (sigh) I
always wonder how many mis-configured PCs exist in the world with little
problems like this quietly slowing down some user who never figures it out.

~~~
VectorLock
>I always wonder how many mis-configured PCs exist in the world with little
problems like this quietly slowing down some user who never figures it out.

All of them.

------
hombre_fatal
I just destroyed my Backblaze buckets recently and realized they didn't have a
"delete" button. You have to make a deletion API request for every single item
in each bucket before you can delete a bucket.

I found that a bit ridiculous. My internet was so bad that I had to spin up an
EC2 nano just to make a few billion requests and have them succeed. Took
hours.

If backblaze wants to charge you on the way out (I wonder how much all those
requests cost me), okay fine. But please just make a "delete bucket" button
that does all this for us. If I was in a worse mood, I would've considered
letting the account accrue balance until they did it for me.

~~~
mr_t
They did an AMA on Reddit a few months ago[0]. I remember this AMA in
particular because they thoroughly explained why they designed some features
in certain ways. Overall they said their target customers are the ones with
absolutely no IT knowledge.

I guess this part from one of their answers fits your complaint quite well:
_But here is the thing - > YOU can work around this problem, the naive
customers CANNOT. Honestly, they are too computer-illiterate. But even
computer illiterate people deserve to have their files backed up, and they are
the target market for Backblaze Personal Backup._ [1]

From this point of view, I guess a "delete" button could be fatal for some of
the older folks out there. But I don't use Backblaze, I don't know if my
comparison makes sense and we both talk about the same thing. The Reddit
quotes refers to their "Backblaze Personal Backup".

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/b6lbew/were_the_backb...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/b6lbew/were_the_backblaze_cloud_team_managing_750/)
[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/b6lbew/were_the_backb...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/b6lbew/were_the_backblaze_cloud_team_managing_750/ejlawg8/)

~~~
pauldavis
Your casual substitution of "older folks" for "people with no IT knowledge" is
ageist ignorance.

~~~
ses1984
Very old folks can start to lose decision making capabilites. It has nothing
to do with IT knowledge. It's why mostly old people fall victim to email and
phone scams and refuse to believe the truth even after you show them mountains
of evidence.

Is that ageism?

~~~
pauldavis
"Very old" != "older" (folks)

~~~
ses1984
Pedantry.

------
Unklejoe
A word of caution to anyone considering buying one of the 4 TB Hitachi drives
listed in the report:

There are a lot of vendors selling “refurbished” HGST drives. Do not buy
these. As I understand it, there is no such thing as a refurbished hard drive
(not economical). They just zero out the SMART data and sell it as
new/refurbished. They even look new, but they’re not.

I made the mistake of buying one. It had a ton of vibration and started
reporting bad sectors immediately.

If you want one of these drives, you’re better off buying an actual used one
off eBay or something.

~~~
iicc
"recertified" drives are a thing.

[https://www.blizzarddr.com/recertified-hard-disk-drives-
refu...](https://www.blizzarddr.com/recertified-hard-disk-drives-refurbished-
hdd/)

~~~
jaclaz
Cannot say nowadays, but once defective multi-platters disks were
"refurbished" (and "recertified") by simply disabling the couple of heads on
the defective platter(s) in firmware and "downgrade" the capacity specs.

It simply makes no sense to actually open a US$ 100 (when new) disk drive to
repair it (replacing parts that even in the factory cost money for the
cataloguing and storage) to re-sell it at US$ 30 or 40.

If you go to the WD page mentioned in the article you linked:

[https://www.wd.com/en-gb/products/wd-recertified.html](https://www.wd.com/en-
gb/products/wd-recertified.html)

you will see how they are all "external disks in a case", those might be
subject to a number of "returns" for reasons different from the actual disk
inside (cosmetic damage, power adapter (if any), connectors, network card or
wi-fi, etc.), so those may (while actually being defective as a whole) well
have not a defective disk inside.

On the other hand, if they are so good, why would the warranty be limited to 6
months (or less).

------
lousken
Since people from backblaze will be reading this - what happened to the
datacenter in europe? Last news I heard was Q2 2019 and we're already way past
that

~~~
miyuru
not a backblaze employee, just a keen eyed user

Blackblaze uses f00{0..9}.backblazeb2.com which represents different data
centers.

Currently f003.backblazeb2.com is live and returns a IP based out of the
Netherlands.

~~~
diblasio
They're hiring here in the Netherlands too.

[https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1351508643](https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1351508643)

~~~
atYevP
That's not us - but easy mistake! I think Backbase is a NL ISP.

~~~
diblasio
aye. My mistake. Keep up the awesome service btw :).

~~~
atYevP
We shall, we shall! ;-)

------
swarnie_
I've been reading these reports since 2012(13?) and have used them multiple
times to buy hard drives for my home storage systems, I haven't always had
similar results however.

Does anyone else use these posts to pick their own personal disks? If so do
you see the data given as a good indicator of lifespan or is the home
environment vs DC just too different?

~~~
sundvor
I wish they were around when I bought 4x IBM Deskstar 60GBs in a RAID 10 in
the early 2000s....

~~~
kijin
HGST has indeed come a long way since their Deathstar days.

------
woliveirajr
Seems that Seagate are the worst, even if it's a 2% failure rate.

And reality sucks: right yesterday I lost one hdd from Seagate and the second
one is making noises. Ohh boy

~~~
beatgammit
I don't think personal results and Backblaze results are really comparable. I
know plenty of people who have have a bad experience with WD drives, and
plenty who have had a fantastic experience with Seagate drives.

Honestly, all hard drives are pretty solid these days, and I honestly don't
think one manufacturer really stands out enough that individuals can really
expect a given drive to last longer than another. Statistics just don't work
on a sample size that small. You may get lucky, or you may get unlucky, it
really just depends on which drive you happen to get.

I make my personal HD buying decisions based on:

\- warranty and customer service \- price \- noise \- performance

Both Seagate and WD have about the same warranty, and they both seem to be
pretty good with customer service (check recent reviews though, this can
change). If you consider them equal in that department, pick based on the
other three metrics.

I was about to buy some Seagate drives for a NAS, but ended up with WD because
they were on sale. I was a little worried about the noise from Seagate, but
the price and performance won me over, but I switched at the last minute
because the price changed.

Now, if you're going to build a data center with a large number of consumer
drives, absolutely use Backblaze's results. If your just going to but a few,
recognise that all drives the test are reasonably reliable, so whether your
drive dies early is mostly luck (assuming you treat them nicely).

~~~
kalleboo
My favorite advice I've heard for home NAS drive buying advice is to mix
brands so if you end up buying a lemon model/batch, at least you've lowered
the risk of them all failing at once when repairing the RAID

------
ksec
Can someone explain on the situation of "Western Digital". I am confused.

At first I thought Western Digital is retiring their WD brand for HDD, and
focus on SSD, but that is not true I find no information on it. There are
still Red, Blue, and others. As a matter of fact, it is the HGST brand that is
getting killed, but the UltraStar _range_ lives on.

So I am assuming the article is saying, the specific breed of HDD, Western
Digital used to provided is no longer available, and it will be replaced by
UltraStar, which used to be a HGST brand but are now under Western Digital ?

What happened to 20TB HDD which Seagate promised for 2020. Are we no where
close to it? And MAMR Drive? Has Price / GB continued to decline, or given the
situation of HDD market, the HDD maker are milking it? ( And I don't blame
them )

------
someonehere
I worked for a startup ten years ago that stored a lot of user data.

A batch of drives from the manufacturer had some sort of firmware issue. It
affected a lot of users.

Essentially their data was put into read only mode by our service. Two weeks
went by before the manufacturer came out and worked on replacing the drives
and migrating the data over for us.

Unfortunately the data center admin at the time didn’t have backup servers and
drives in place and lost his job over the snafu once the drives were replaced.

Always have backups of your data and make sure the drives are good quality.

------
Siecje
I have a few drives with video files and I use Backblaze for Windows. But
there is no local redundancy. What is a better solution?

~~~
bristleworm
All my data is on a Synology NAS. Can't think of anything better.

~~~
decoyworker
I was considering picking up one of these but they seem incredibly overpriced
for the specs listed.

~~~
vel0city
When you're buying a Synology you're not just buying hardware but also a
pretty dang solid software suite. I've used several NAS products along with
FreeNAS, Windows File Services, and plain old Samba. Synology has always been
just about the easiest to use with excellent mobile and web apps for accessing
your files on the go. It all depends on what you're really wanting out of your
NAS.

