They're not buying that many drives. They said they bought 16k drives last year? I can only imaging that Dell, HP, Levovo, etc buy orders of magnitude more drives. I can't imagine that the various HDD makers don't have the capacity to support their volumes. I'm sure they're buying from different channels though.Some manufacturers may not be able to meet their volume demands either.
I also wonder if publishing their reliability info strains any relationship they might have with drive manufacturers.
That's when they were small. I'd like to see a graph of their drive buying numbers per year. I'm sure they could get drives direct now.Consider that after the floods in 2011, these guys were going around to Sam's Club and Costco to buy up local stock so they could de-shell cheap external drives. I'm guessing they're not big enough to get the breaks they want/need directly from drive vendors or top-tier suppliers but too big for retail or consumer supply. I also wonder if publishing their reliability info strains any relationship they might have with drive manufacturers.
What about modern drives; is the 6TB NASD any good?
I do not see HGST 6TB NAS drives listed in their data. I have several in my workstations and they've been fine but I'm a tiny sample.
They cost half as much enterprise drives and fail at a less than 25% (total) rate.I never understand their logic. Does the Backblaze just buy whatever is on sale that week? Most of the cheap drives are not designed for ser multi-disk environment with vibration detection and compensation, so how do they account for that?
I don't think that is correct takeaway. Plus the ArsTechnica headline is grossly misleading. They should have said something like "Of drives that failed, they typically failed in under 3 years." to be less misleading.Looks like anything 10TB+ in size, expect it to die in 3yrs...
No, it's just showing that the most common age of failures is less than three yaers. That does not count the vast majority of drives that are still working. Their aggregate AFR is 1.40%. Other than the one 14TB Segate drive with higher than typical AFR, there is not a lot to practically separate them.Another necro thread rise...
Backblaze reliability for Q1 - 2023.
HDDs typically failed in under 3 years in Backblaze study of 17,155 failed drives
Seagate still stands out.arstechnica.com
Looks like anything 10TB+ in size, expect it to die in 3yrs...
Exactly, and the 16TB drives probably have limited hours as they would be newer drives.I don't think that is correct takeaway. Plus the ArsTechnica headline is grossly misleading. They should have said something like "Of drives that failed, they typically failed in under 3 years." to be less misleading.
Also, "The drive with the lowest AFR[ Annual Failure Rate] (0.28 percent) and at least 2.2 million drive days is Western Digital Corporation (WDC)'s 16TB WUH721816ALE6L4 (Backblaze has 14,098 units)."