I, too, love Backblaze's reports. But they provide no information regarding drive endurance. While I became aware of this with SSDs, HDD manufacturers are reporting this too, usually as a warranty item, and with surprisingly lower numbers than I would have expected.<p>For example, in the Pro-sumer space, both WD's Red Pro and Gold HDDs report[1] their endurance limit as 550TB/year total bytes "transferred* to or from the drive hard drive", regardless of drive size.<p>[1] See Specifications, and especially their footnote 1 at the bottom of the page: <a href="https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-pro-sata-hdd?sku=WD161KFGX" rel="nofollow">https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-r...</a>
> The 4TB Toshiba (model: MD04ABA400V) are not in the Q1 2024 Drive Stats tables. This was not an oversight. The last of these drives became a migration target early in Q1 and their data was securely transferred to pristine 16TB Toshiba drives.<p>That's a milestone. Imagine the racks that were eliminated
I wonder how the pricing works out. I look at the failure rates and my general take away is "buy Western Digital" for my qty 1 purchases. But if you look within a category, say 14TB drives, they've purchased 4 times as many Toshiba drives as WD. Are the vendors pricing these such that it's worth a slightly higher failure rate to get the $/TB down?
They are kingkong. After they started publishing these Seagate seemingly stopped selling trash less and less. Had so many Seagate drives going south. Bleh. Would be nice to see SSD drive stats too. There are so many terrible SSDs out there, like SP, which has utter trash controllers. One day your drive gets locked up without any forewarning, and your data just disappears.
As with every time these come out, <i>Remember that Backblaze's usage pattern is different from yours!</i><p>Well, unless you're putting large numbers of consumer SATA drives into massive storage arrays with proper power and cooling in a data center.
I find the stats interesting, but it's hard to actually inform any decisions because by the time the stats come out, who knows what's actually shipping.
Does Backblaze ever buy refurbs? I'm guessing not, but I'd be curious to see any data on how failure rates compare after manufacturers recertify.
Says the annual failure rate is 1.5%, but average time to failure is 2.5 years? Those numbers don't line up.<p>Are most drives retired without failing?
> <i>A Few Good Zeroes: In Q1 2024, three drive models had zero failures</i><p>They go on to list 3 Seagate models that share one common factor: Sharply lower drive counts. Backblaze had a lot fewer of these drives.<p><i>All of their <5 failures</i> are from low quantity drives.<p>I have confidence in the rest of their report - but not with the inference that those 3 Seagate models are more reliable.
<a href="https://youtu.be/IgJ6YolLxYE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/IgJ6YolLxYE</a><p>This video presents AFR, failure rates, derived from prior backblaze reports, aggregated.<p>Definitely worth a watch if you're interested in this report.
Looks like WDC reliability has improved a lot in the past decade.<p>Seagate continues to trail behind competitors.<p>I guess they're basically competing on price? Because with data like this, I don't know why anyone running data center would buy Seagate over WD?