
Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q1 2019 - th0br0
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2019/
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idlewords
As someone who runs a tiny archiving operation (about 70 hard drives) I find
these stats invaluable and am so grateful to you for publishing them! You make
it a lot easier to navigate an expensive and intimidating world of hardware
options.

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atYevP
Yev here -> Glad you enjoy them! Thanks for reading!

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jcheng
I've enjoyed the Backblaze hard drive failure rate posts for years, but never
realized they publish the underlying data! [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-
drive-test-data.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html)
(scroll down)

It looks quite detailed--a daily snapshot of all of the SMART values for each
individual hard drive.

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philliphaydon
I don’t know why but every time I read one I’m never disappointed. I find the
data fascinating. I wish more companies would give information like this but
on memory, cpus etc also.

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diggernet
You know, I'll bet Backblaze goes through lots of memory, cpus, etc, too. Yev?
:)

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atYevP
Hah yes, but likely not in the quantity that would make this interesting!

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mikepurvis
How have they got 2k boot drives for 100k data drives? Are these special
motherboards with 50 (!) SATA connectors on them? Or is it many machines
netbooting and share-mounting root from a handful of control nodes? I get that
it's backup, so most of the data is at rest most of the time, but that still
seems like a really high ratio of network ports to disk drives.

Either way, interesting that the boot drives are actual drives and not SD card
pairs or something, like how vSANs are often set up.

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nacs
Yep, the latest pods have 60 drives:

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

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joering2
Using 16TB drives you will get 9.6 Petabyes of storage per Pod 6.0. It would
fit you circa 21,276 blu-ray rips.

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YUMad
You mean Linux ISOs.

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blihp
I'm really interested to see how those high capacity Helium-filled drives hold
up over time. (i.e. I've been wondering how much leakage is going to be a
problem)

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atYevP
Yev here -> that info should be in the SMART stats, so if you see a dip,
checking there will give you a lot more context (though we'd likely call that
out in our blog).

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kdkeyser
Does Backblaze have any SMR drives in use, or do you have plans to start using
them? Would be really interesting to see if these exhibit a worse failure
rate.

Anyway, thanks for sharing this data, I really like the openness.

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atYevP
Yev here -> No SMR drives in production at this point in time!

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ChrisRR
I thoroughly enjoy reading these stats every time they're released.

It's just a shame that their user interface is missing many features I want,
otherwise I would use them.

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TruffleLabs
I’m just glad it works, I’m a Backblaze customer:)

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atYevP
Yev from Backblaze -> as an employee, I'm glad it works too :D

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lousken
Still waiting for the Europe datacenter so I can start my backups :)

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mhkool
my prediction: all four items in the list of predictions will happen.

