Latest BackBlaze drive stats

  • Thread starter Deleted member 138126
  • Start date

Deleted member 138126

D

Deleted member 138126

OP
Consumer drives in an enterprise environment...

I'm sceptical.
They ordered 16,000 4TB drives in 2015. Says it all.

Enterprise drives cost what they cost because the vendors know they can get away with it, not because the price in any way reflects the true cost. The manufacturing process is exactly the same.

We pay over £1,000 for 300GB SSDs from EMC. Are they made with pixie gold fairy unicorn dust? That's over 10x the cost of equivalent (probably faster) consumer SSDs. You could put up with a LOT of failures (assuming your infrastructure is capable of handling the failures, which is what BackBlaze does) for a 90% savings.

Horses for courses. It's all about risk and liability.
 
Soldato
Joined
2 Nov 2007
Posts
4,184
BackBlaze's results are really meaningless outside of their situation (constant reads/writes 24/7), and complete meaningless in some instances due to the tiny sample sizes.

Hard drives are mechanical and they can, and do, fail. Rarely there's a bad model - not manufacturer - that's more likely to fail. Backup, then you won't lose anything important and develop an irrational prejudice.
 
Caporegime
Joined
8 Sep 2005
Posts
27,421
Location
Utopia
BackBlaze's results are really meaningless outside of their situation (constant reads/writes 24/7), and complete meaningless in some instances due to the tiny sample sizes.

Hard drives are mechanical and they can, and do, fail. Rarely there's a bad model - not manufacturer - that's more likely to fail. Backup, then you won't lose anything important and develop an irrational prejudice.

What do you mean tiny sample sizes?
 
Man of Honour
Joined
13 Oct 2006
Posts
90,821
They ordered 16,000 4TB drives in 2015. Says it all.

Enterprise drives cost what they cost because the vendors know they can get away with it, not because the price in any way reflects the true cost. The manufacturing process is exactly the same.

We pay over £1,000 for 300GB SSDs from EMC. Are they made with pixie gold fairy unicorn dust? That's over 10x the cost of equivalent (probably faster) consumer SSDs. You could put up with a LOT of failures (assuming your infrastructure is capable of handling the failures, which is what BackBlaze does) for a 90% savings.

Horses for courses. It's all about risk and liability.

Depends a bit but often enterprise drives come with a different warranty/service agreement to consumer drives and in some cases use uprated components to provide significantly increased MTBFs.

Depending on requirements you may find they are significantly better workload optimised as well - while maybe not having the raw speeds of a high end consumer drive a lot higher IOPs for instance.

EDIT: Many years ago I tried using normal consumer HDDs in a server that was parsing and logging significant amounts of data in realtime (probably the equivalent of a few days worth of posts on these forums every hour) and after a few weeks they'd fail - with one literally almost melting :p quite dramatic heat failure under constant load - replaced with an enterprise level drive it ran happily for years.
 
Last edited:

Deleted member 138126

D

Deleted member 138126

OP
They don't even have 50 units of some models in use and they publish data. Some of their previous 'statistics' have included models where they have had around 10 in use.
They clearly state the numbers of drives in each sample size.
 

Deleted member 138126

D

Deleted member 138126

OP
So what is your point?
That they are providing raw data, which is better than none at all. And they are being up front about it, and have no agenda. Each person is then free to take his or her own conclusions from said data.

My point is that your use of 'quotes' was meant to imply scorn or mistrust. I don't see why that is warranted.
 
Caporegime
Joined
8 Jan 2004
Posts
31,994
Location
Rutland
ST3000DM001 - ultimate lemon of a drive, and it's my only mechanical drive in my main rig :(

Yes Backblazes data is from a different environment to home use but unless you want to survey thousands of home users over years it's about as good as you're going to get realistically.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
2 Nov 2007
Posts
4,184
That they are providing raw data, which is better than none at all. And they are being up front about it, and have no agenda. Each person is then free to take his or her own conclusions from said data.

My point is that your use of 'quotes' was meant to imply scorn or mistrust. I don't see why that is warranted.

Incomplete raw data is provided (nothing on environment, role, etc which I'd definitely want to know), but they aren’t only providing that. They use the statistically insignificant data to draw conclusions and include them in their representations of the data. Not to mention that they know very well what happens when they do this. It’s mostly read and republished as manufacturer X is bad. No agenda? A TON of attention does them no harm…

And what does your opening post say?
 
Soldato
Joined
2 Nov 2007
Posts
4,184
Depends a bit but often enterprise drives come with a different warranty/service agreement to consumer drives and in some cases use uprated components to provide significantly increased MTBFs.

Depending on requirements you may find they are significantly better workload optimised as well - while maybe not having the raw speeds of a high end consumer drive a lot higher IOPs for instance.

EDIT: Many years ago I tried using normal consumer HDDs in a server that was parsing and logging significant amounts of data in realtime (probably the equivalent of a few days worth of posts on these forums every hour) and after a few weeks they'd fail - with one literally almost melting :p quite dramatic heat failure under constant load - replaced with an enterprise level drive it ran happily for years.

Is there anything definitive written about this?

Time was an enterprise drive was usually a physically a different beast with higher IOPs (higher spindle speed) and lower STR (less platter density). But the ones that look the same on paper, is there actually a physical difference? I have never seen anything that conclusively says they use better components or they’re tested and binned.

Sure they state a higher MTBF and have a longer warranty, but is that legitimate and not just part of the premium they charge?

They may have an SAS controller, and if SATA different firmware more suited to array use including power management - which could make a difference if you’re trying to use them 24/7?

External disks, which BackBlaze had/have thousands upon thousands of (removed from their cases), are rumoured to be the worst drives with the least warranty and MTBF, and perhaps the firmware making them even less suitable still.
 

Deleted member 138126

D

Deleted member 138126

OP
Incomplete raw data is provided (nothing on environment, role, etc which I'd definitely want to know), but they aren’t only providing that. They use the statistically insignificant data to draw conclusions and include them in their representations of the data. Not to mention that they know very well what happens when they do this. It’s mostly read and republished as manufacturer X is bad. No agenda? A TON of attention does them no harm…

And what does your opening post say?
No agenda as in not pushing any specific result. Of course they get attention, which is good for them, but I don't see how that taints the results? As far as I'm concerned, the results can speak for themselves.

What environment? Let's assume it isn't an open tent in the middle of a sandstorm in the Sahara; i.e. environment = "a generic datacenter". What role? Storing people's stuff. I would say 99% of the time these disks are idle, as my logical deduction is that stuff gets backed up, and then extremely rarely touched again. So once disks fill up, they will still receive random access, but on a fairly rare basis.

My opening post was meant to be facetious, apologies if that didn't come through.

I guess what I don't get is this: you imply that you would prefer if they didn't release this data at all?
 
Associate
Joined
27 Feb 2014
Posts
2,132
more info on their storage pods here.
A few things stands out they use EVGA Supernova psu's, and 'We have multiple (10-30) pods online at any time accepting data'.
Looking at the pics they are running the drives vertically, not ideal for a desktop drive.
 
Don
Joined
21 Oct 2002
Posts
46,744
Location
Parts Unknown
The underlying rule is..

Never trust a hard drive

Keep your data on at least 2 drives. 3 if possible.


All manufacturers get the odd blip where they have a run of bad drives. Remeber the IBM DeskStar ? Massive failure rate!
 
Soldato
Joined
11 Jun 2003
Posts
5,056
Location
Sheffield, UK
the backblaze data, while not totally realistic for home use IS using all the drives in the same way. They're getting tortured (to death) so it DOES give a reasonable sample of the overall reliability of a drive in a worst case usage setup.

I don't understand the mentality of folks that immediately go "but it's not like home use!" and "The data is irrelevant". For the first point, no, it's not... but it IS using consumer drives in a really harsh way and showing which can take the beating the best(?). That to me would imply reliability.
For the second point (irrelevant data) MTBF (mean times between failure) is basically a measure of how long a drive should typically last in use. Drives that have consistently higher failure rates in the backblaze data will generally show ones that LIKELY have lower MTBF averages and are (overall) less reliable.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom