Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

I really appreciate BackBlaze opening up this data. While I don&#x27;t purchase HDDs often, I always refer to these reports when deciding.<p>They also open sourced their server chassis which is awesome!<p>It&#x27;s nice to see a reduction of the failure rates as a whole. It looks like the next few years will be some interesting times for the growth in storage capacities for HDDs.

Tangentially related. Whenever I get a new drive, I always do a &quot;burn-in&quot;. A program writes data to the whole drive and then reads it back (reproducible random data).<p>Is there any real justification for doing this kind of test on a new drive?<p>Doing it takes quite awhile, so I&#x27;ve been wondering lately if it&#x27;s even worth it. I&#x27;ve never found anything with it.

I wonder if any of those companies talk to Backblaze about it. Like sending drives back for inspection :)<p>I&#x27;m also curious why those companies wouldn&#x27;t directly talk to backblaze. I read somewhere a blog post on how they bought specific drives online at a sale.

Thank you Backblaze! I love your reports.<p>What is your procedure&#x2F;policy on which disks to use in the pods? Do you try and maybe control the risk by using different harddisk brands in a single storage pod? Or do you just not care, because there have never been 3 pods dead at the same time? :)<p>Do you still use 17 data plus 3 parity shards?

I&#x27;m interested in failure rate per iops. If the drive fails infrequently, great, but if it&#x27;s also the worst performing drive, screw that. Would rather buy drives that perform as well as possible with the least failure rate.

HGST look like the best, but they don&#x27;t have the quantities of the Seagate, makes me wonder if these numbers are skewed :&#x2F;

Anything interesting in this one? I&#x27;ve stopped reading them because they all seem to be &quot;Seagates fail kind of a lot but we use them because reasons. HGST doesn&#x27;t fail a lot, but we also have statistically insignificant numbers of them, so &lt;shrug&gt;.&quot;

My company uses Backblaze since I think it&#x27;s a good product, but blogs like this really cemented my choice. I appreciate their attention to detail and publishing data openly.

I wonder if they have states failure rate based on a drive&#x27;s manufacturing or installation date? It looks like there&#x27;s a bit of a bathtub curve, and it would be interesting to see if that&#x27;s attributed to individual drives having a tendency to fail quickly (if they&#x27;re going to), or if drives are less likely to crap out once their model has been manufactured for a few years

Is there anything similar for SSDs?

I realize my comment is a tangent. I&#x27;m hoping folks might be understanding and hopefully have some advice.<p>If you have terabytes to back up, are there still any backup services left that&#x27;ll let you ship them a drive for a faster initial backup?

While I&#x27;ve heard lots of great things about the Backblaze reports, I&#x27;ve noticed in comments on NewEgg, Amazon, etc that the SKUs mentioned in the report frequently aren&#x27;t available anymore. I&#x27;ve never had problems with WD Red drives though I don&#x27;t purchase them all from the same vendor at the same time to make sure I get drives from different lots in case of a lot defect.

Curious if anyone knows how they calculate drive days. For example the first drive on their report (hgst 4tb) has a count of 50 but total days of 23069. If I take the 50 by the days it should be 18250, so not sure where the extra 4k in days is coming from. Retired drives or something?

BackBlaze spent ~12 million dollars on 12TB Seagate drives (at full retail)

Would be interesting to also have metrics on failure per TB storage.

Relibality looks decent this year. All my seagates are having tons of errors, i think i&#x27;ll stick to the other team from now on even though seagates seems to be getting better.

Odd they don&#x27;t have the 6TB HGST on the list. Well, maybe not odd, but annoying since I&#x27;m curious about that drive&#x27;s performance especially

Do larger capacity drives have higher failure rates?

A perennial favorite, literally. Thank you.

TIL - Seagate drives are still basically shit :)