The latest BackBlaze drive stats report was released today.  This quarterly reports offer invaluable insight into real-world, hard-use hard drive statistics.

If you’re not familiar with BackBlaze, they’re a mid-tier storage company, offering two main products: PC backups and cloud storage buckets (B2).  I’ve been a customer for many years, and while I wouldn’t necessarily be an investor, their service has been rock solid for me.

If you’re going to be a storage provider, you need hard drives.  Lots of hard drives.  BackBlaze uses BackBlaze Pods, which are custom rackmount units stuffed with drives.  They publish all the specs online in case you want to build one for yourself, including blueprints, YouTube videos, etc.  The latest 6.0 pod has 60 drives, with 480TB of storage, costing BackBlaze about $.036 per GB.  Keep in mind they buy them in sets of 500 and order 200,000+ hard drives per year, so they’re racking up (pun intended!) a lot of volume savings.  Their cost is about $8,733 per pod.

The Report

With hundreds of thousands of hard drives in use, BackBlaze is positioned to analyze the performance of these drives and their failure rates.  You can even download the raw data yourself.

My personal biases seem confirmed when reading this report: Western Digital has much lower failure rates than Seagate.  Lifetime, the worst WDC drive is at about a .93% failure rate, while some Seagates are over 2% and one is at nearly 6%.  I’ve sworn by WDC Black drives for years so happy to see them performing well at scale.

Of course, any individual drive could perform outside the mean.  My own experiences bear that out.  I’ve had some that fail before the end of the five-year warranty and others that crank on into years seven and eight.

Still, if you’re shopping for hard drives, the report is a valuable index tool.  Think of it as Consumer Reports Ratings for hard drives.

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.