
Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2017 - ingve
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2017/
======
red0point
As I was dissatisfied by their provided graphs, I made up my own using R &
Kaplan Meier Survival tools to determine how long I could expect a hard drive
to „survive“.

[https://medium.com/@simonerni/dissecting-backblaze-hard-
driv...](https://medium.com/@simonerni/dissecting-backblaze-hard-drive-
stats-2017-17a90089a2e8)

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opendomain
I love these posts - so much that when my laptop died for a few days, I
immediately signed up for Backblaze backup when it came back to life.

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atYevP
Glad we could help!

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bobbles
Within the last month I had to do a full 2TB recovery using 50GB to 150GB
recovery files.. truly a life saver!

I was able to completely start from scratch with a clean widnows install and a
new HDD after one day my computer just straight up died (zero HDD activity at
all).

So.. thanks!

~~~
omnifischer
how much time it took to download 2 TB

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gizmo686
Blackblaze supports FedexNet. Latency is atrosious, but its bandwidth is hard
to beat.

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JepZ
Does anybody know why they still use so many Seagate and WD models when the
HGST seem to have the better reliability?

Am I reading the stats wrong or are other factors involved like higher prices
or so?

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dspillett
As well as the risk/cost calculation already mentioned, it makes sense to
spread over multiple manufacturers to allow for sudden problems with the one
that is currently most reliable. If HGST has a huge production problem now
that doesn't make its effects known until silly high rates of failure occur a
year down the line, backblaze and other large storage providers would have a
sudden glut of replacements to manage (possibly pro-active replacements, or
even worse the expense of bulking up their redundancy level at least
temporarily to mitigate the extra risk). Spreading over multiple manufacturers
limits the impact of situations like this.

~~~
AdamJacobMuller
It's also very beneficial to spread data across different drive manufacturers.
If, for example, a particular HGST model starts to have massive failure
problems in a year (massive at this scale would be like 20% failure rates),
well, at least you still have a healthy population of Seagate/WD drives where
the data on the HGST drives is also replicated to.

I wouldn't be remotely shocked if the Backblaze software takes drive model
into account in data placement.

In addition to that, it makes sense from a purchasing perspective to spread
your purchases around to many vendors. Make sure that Hitachi knows that
they're not irreplaceable if they don't give you a good enough price you'll
just buy more Seagate drives. Make Seagate always be worried that if you
shifted enough purchasing to HGST they'll cut you a really good deal and
potentially undercut Seagate.

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Already__Taken
I know they don't use SSD due to cost and it's probably excessive performance
for their needs. But I wonder how their costs compare when you factor in the
density and energy efficiencies. You could fit a lot of silicon in the space a
storage post has for 45 3.5" drives. I found their 2014 blog post about a
500PB new datacenter, and their recent 2018 post is about crossing 500PB. So
does storage per sqr/foot ever matter or is it just better to get another DC?

~~~
chx
A spinning disk dissipates about 6W on average, for 100 000 disks that's
600kw. With an average of 0.12 USD paid for a kwh times 24 hours, their energy
bill is less than 2000 USD a day. Their HDD cost based on the "81.76 — The
number of hard drives that were installed each day in 2017." and we know they
mostly now do 8TB at roughly 0.02 USD per GB according to
[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-
gigabyte/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/) which
is 13000 USD a day. That means even if we had SSDs at zero watts, they would
need to be (13+2/13) ~ 15% more expensive than HDDs in order to break even but
if you look at [https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-
drive/](https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/) you will
see it's still about 8 times as expensive. Obviously there's some savings due
to floor space but the savings are going to be really low there. And this is
just the economics side.

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agumonkey
There a webinar link at the bottom, might be interesting

[https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14807/300531?utm_source=B...](https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14807/300531?utm_source=Backblaze-
blog&utm_medium=brighttalk&utm_campaign=300531)

in case people didn't see

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kqr
Neat! One of the RAID mirror drives at home is showing some pre-failure signs,
so I'm looking to insert a hot spare. I guess HGST or Toshiba is the way to
go!

~~~
frumiousirc
Not necessarily.

One nice thing about this report is they take into account the low statistics
in some of their drive models and represent that as confidence intervals. If
you look at the second table, 8TB HGST and 5TB Toshiba have a wide uncertainty
due to them having tested fewer of these drives so far. Their data can not yet
tell us if the AFR for these drives are significantly different from others.

They do have many of the smaller 4TB HGST and so have tight uncertainty on
them and they are indeed low AFR. So if that size is suitable then it's a no
brainer choice. But, if bigger capacities are needed and looking at the high
confidence limit column, the 6TB and 8TB Seagate models are safer bets.

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FraKtus
Seems to be down... I suppose we are all jumping on it to see what to buy next
:-)

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atYevP
Yev from Backblaze -> Heh, clear cache and try again?

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balladeer
Since atYevP often comments on these posts here on HN, I thought I will use
this opportunity to ask few questions about two of their products. And I am
also asking because such questions usually get sidestepped elsewhere or maybe
it just seems so :-)

Hi Yev,

1\. Months ago when CrashPlan shut its doors to individual customers you (and
a founder) had mentioned you guys are planning on (possibly) changing the data
deletion and version/data retention policy of BackBlaze to something less
outrageous. Any update on that?

2\. Also, there have been mentions of letting users use the BackBlaze backup
app (or some other app by BackBlaze) where they can set the destination/sink
to a B2 account, set rules regarding what to backup, frequency, retention,
pruning etc. Users will pay for what they use - essentially fixing many of the
"point 1" complaints (mentioned above). Any updates on this either? (And no
other integrated apps so far just don't cut it)

3\. Adding a proper restore interface to the standard backup app - with proper
pause and resume of course, and with option of saving to a location specified
by the user (you can actually just copy CrashPlan on this :P); and not just
limiting users to the browser restore interface or shipping the hard disk.

Past threads:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125340)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15072866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15072866)

~~~
chx
While you might have some legit grief with the service Backblaze provides, I
would recommend toning the accusatory tone down by several notches. "questions
sidestepped" "outrageous" etc. This is a courteous place.

~~~
ryanlol
Perhaps it would also be courteous to read balladeers comment more charitably,
it hardly seems right to describe it as "accusatory" or to accuse him of
presenting loaded questions.

He asked some perfectly reasonable questions for which he presumably was
unable to get answers elsewhere, hence "sidestepped". Pointing out that he
finds a policy "outrageous" is hardly rude.

