Backblaze is awesome. Anyone not using it should give it a try.<p>But I have a question - why do they share this info? Is it to show they’re reliable or just for curiosity? Or some other reason?
What would be interesting for SSD is percentage of advertized TBW when (or just before) the SSD failed, ie 100% if the SSD fails at exactly its advertized TBW, 50% if it fails at half the TBW, and 200% if it lasts two times the advertized TBW.<p>In case someone from backblaze read this :)
One thing I've always wondered, are these drives what people would recommend that you stick in a desktop or nas or are these 'datacenter' drives that are overkill for consumer use?
I once had a 20-drive NAS with 1 TB Samsung Spinpoints F1s.<p>The NAS is replaced but I still have the drives just for labbing / testing purposes.<p>I never had a drive failure during the lifetime of the NAS. Probably because it was off most of the time and only powered-on with wakeonlan when needed.<p>So those drives don’t have many hours on them. But recently they started dying. I lost 3 of them this year during some tests.<p>Imagine that these drives are probably 10+ years old.<p>Age does seem to matter.<p>Obviously this is a small uncontrolled sample but it seems that you really should keep this in mind when you run a NAS at home. Keep an eye on the SMART parameters as suggested by Backblaze and really consider replacing drives at some point. I would be afraid that drives do start dying at the same time due to age.
Does backblaze ever power cycle the drives (either on a schedule or due to planned/unforeseen circumstances)?<p>If so, it would be interesting to know how many drives failed on the day of a power cycle vs days with no power cycle.<p>I know other providers have found that "power cycle days" can be 100x more deadly for drives than "non-power-cycle days". It can have a massive impact when estimating data loss probabilities - since unforseen power cycle days tend to impact more than one drive at a time...
Think of the classic "bathtub" curve (which says that young drives fail more frequently, old drives fail more frequently, and mid-age drives are most reliable).<p>That curve <i>doesn't</i> seem to match the data here. Or if it does, it says the "old" increase in failure rate happens at over 5 years.<p>I would guess backblaze will replace these old drives because they are too small/too slow/use too much power before they replace them for being too unreliable.
I feel like SSD failure has little correlation with hours running, and more to do with TBW. Would be nice to see some read/write totals on these stats going forward.
Just echoing the sentiment of loving Backblaze. The HDD stats really aligns with the open source roots of the company. I love that they also open source the designs of their storage pods.<p>This "show your work" strategy helps me trust them at the end of the day. With this kind of storage being a commodity, a high level of openness could be a competitive advantage.
Someday I'm going to take those numbers and try to see how the AFR varies with the age of the drive. I expect 8 year old drives to have a higher AFR than 3yo, and 6 month olds to be somewhere in between, for example.<p>And then, we could compute what the life expectancy of a given model is given how long you've had it (just bought, few years old, etc)<p>It'd be fun to compare those across vendors and drive models. There's maybe even enough data at this point that some of the numbers might be meaningful! =)