Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

[Megalith]

Backblaze has released a year’s worth of hard drive statistics for those who are convinced certain brands fare considerably better than others. While the backup company’s latest charts do bolster the reputation of certain drives (e.g., HGST/Hitachi), 2018’s annualized failure rate was only 1.25%, the lowest the company has ever recorded.

As of December 31, 2018, we had 106,919 spinning hard drives. Of that number, there were 1,965 boot drives and 104,954 data drives. This review looks at the hard drive failure rates for the data drive models in operation in our data centers. In addition, we’ll take a look at the new hard drive models we’ve added in 2018 including our 12 TB HGST and 14 TB Toshiba drives. Along the way we’ll share observations and insights on the data presented and we look forward to you doing the same in the comments.

 

[ole-m]

takeaway: seagate getting better, HGST have made a bad drive compared to what they're usually up to:
damn reliable drives

 

[KazeoHin]

I gotta admit: Seagate finally pulled their shit together.

And if you know how I've posted in these backblaze threads before, you'll know I wouldn't say that lightly.

 

[pcgeekesq]

I remember when HDD reliability actually mattered to desktop users like me.
I've got some RAID5 rust spinning in a NAS for backups, but if it failed, everything's also on SSD backups.

 

[tunatime]

I remember when HDD reliability actually mattered to desktop users like me.
I've got some RAID5 rust spinning in a NAS for backups, but if it failed, everything's also on SSD backups.

My one fear with SSD they just fail. Most he'd I had diead had problems before before they failed. That said I'm down to 2 hdd data drives and have moved almost entirely to SSD

 

[motqalden]

My one fear with SSD they just fail. Most he'd I had diead had problems before before they failed. That said I'm down to 2 hdd data drives and have moved almost entirely to SSD

sometimes they fail and won't boot, other times i have had them lock to read only which is nice if you want to get your data off, but it leaves you in a position where you can't wipe the drive for RMA if you want to send it in on warranty. One of my drives did this with only 4TB written to it... I don't really want them snooping through my data...

 

[shspvr]

takeaway: seagate getting better, HGST have made a bad drive compared to what they're usually up to:
damn reliable drives

There a big a diff in the two Seagate are retail vs HGST, WDC, Toshiba are enterprise drive and look like the Seagate 8TB are doing petty good

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Nice to see my 10TB Seagates continuing to perform well!

 

[///AMG]

I remember when HDD reliability actually mattered to desktop users like me.
I've got some RAID5 rust spinning in a NAS for backups, but if it failed, everything's also on SSD backups.

Its super uneconomical for me to have backups of everything I have on my nas with spinning drives on an ssd backup. I have 8 10TB HDDs and its half full with photos and stuff I did from my side business as a consultant (mostly from this). I havent even counted my movie backups. I need to find a cheap backup solution for my nas but to get SSD backups of that would cost me nearly $7.5k (cheap $250 2tb ssds) just to have backups. I'm going to probably start looking at looking at buying a rack, with tape storage as backup and keep my QNAP's as media once my new house is built. If ssd's fall to a third of the price then I might switch.

 

[shspvr]

Its super uneconomical for me to have backups of everything I have on my nas with spinning drives on an ssd backup. I have 8 10TB HDDs and its half full with photos and stuff I did from my side business as a consultant (mostly from this). I havent even counted my movie backups. I need to find a cheap backup solution for my nas but to get SSD backups of that would cost me nearly $7.5k (cheap $250 2tb ssds) just to have backups. I'm going to probably start looking at looking at buying a rack, with tape storage as backup and keep my QNAP's as media once my new house is built. If ssd's fall to a third of the price then I might switch.

I hate burst your bubble ///AMG but tape storage are over $2k and $33 per cartridge that just for the small LTO-6 2.5TB there also a LTO-7 $2.6k, 6TB $60 per cartridge and LTO-8 5K,12TB $400 per cartridge

 

[///AMG]

I hate burst your bubble ///AMG but tape storage are over $2k and $33 per cartridge that just for the small LTO-6 2.5TB there also a LTO-7 $2.6k, 6TB $60 per cartridge and LTO-8 5K,12TB $400 per cartridge

So still cheaper overall than SSDs right now is what you are saying, still 3.3k (for the drive and 30 cartridges) vs 7.5k for 70tb. I mean even after the drive cost for 7.5k I could get 300TB of backup. I dont need a lot of these files to be accessible all the time and I dont really mind about the speed. I just want to keep the files in the case that a client wants to do another project so I can see what I did on their last one, basically just archive them after a year and put that in storage.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

To me in 2019 there is no reason to have spinners on a client machine, but they are still the most effective way to do mass storage and NAS

My 120TB NAS is expensive enough as it is. 120TB of SSD's would be nuts.

 

[pcgeekesq]

Its super uneconomical for me to have backups of everything I have on my nas with spinning drives on an ssd backup. I have 8 10TB HDDs and its half full with photos and stuff I did from my side business as a consultant (mostly from this). I havent even counted my movie backups. I need to find a cheap backup solution for my nas but to get SSD backups of that would cost me nearly $7.5k (cheap $250 2tb ssds) just to have backups. I'm going to probably start looking at looking at buying a rack, with tape storage as backup and keep my QNAP's as media once my new house is built. If ssd's fall to a third of the price then I might switch.

If all that data really matters to you, you should be backing it up offsite.
Backblaze itself offers their B2 service it for $5/TB/mo. -- $200/mo for the 40TB you claim to have (a high estimate that assumes you haven't RAID'd those drives).
And it's probably far more secure and definitely more disaster-proof than your home NAS.

 

[Joust]

To me in 2019 there is no reason to have spinners on a client machine, but they are still the most effective way to do mass storage and NAS

My 120TB NAS is expensive enough as it is. 120TB of SSD's would be nuts.

Most Effective - no. Economical, yes.

 

[Joust]

If all that data really matters to you, you should be backing it up offsite.
Backblaze itself offers their B2 service it for $5/TB/mo. -- $200/mo for the 40TB you claim to have (a high estimate that assumes you haven't RAID'd those drives).
And it's probably far more secure and definitely more disaster-proof than your home NAS.

This.

Edit: by that, I mean off-site solutions. There are many vendors to choose from.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

This.

Edit: by that, I mean off-site solutions. There are many vendors to choose from.

I just dropped my old storage server at friend's place and host one of his servers in return.

Off-site backup without the expense

 

[///AMG]

If all that data really matters to you, you should be backing it up offsite.
Backblaze itself offers their B2 service it for $5/TB/mo. -- $200/mo for the 40TB you claim to have (a high estimate that assumes you haven't RAID'd those drives).
And it's probably far more secure and definitely more disaster-proof than your home NAS.

I may do it after I move in to my new house. But with Comcast I dont want to pay for the extra bandwidth. Still over time imo it’s much cheaper to buy tape cartridges and store them away offsite than to pay $200/mo increasing to have that backup on black blaze. For me $50-100/mo for 50-100tb would be a no brainer.

 

[DocNo]

I may do it after I move in to my new house. But with Comcast I dont want to pay for the extra bandwidth.

How much does that content really change? Probably not that much. You can ship them drivers to seed your offsite backup. Or you can start it now before you switch ISPs.

 

[Algrim]

I may do it after I move in to my new house. But with Comcast I dont want to pay for the extra bandwidth. Still over time imo it’s much cheaper to buy tape cartridges and store them away offsite than to pay $200/mo increasing to have that backup on black blaze. For me $50-100/mo for 50-100tb would be a no brainer.

AWS Snowball.

 

[motomonkey]

So still cheaper overall than SSDs right now is what you are saying, still 3.3k (for the drive and 30 cartridges) vs 7.5k for 70tb. I mean even after the drive cost for 7.5k I could get 300TB of backup. I dont need a lot of these files to be accessible all the time and I dont really mind about the speed. I just want to keep the files in the case that a client wants to do another project so I can see what I did on their last one, basically just archive them after a year and put that in storage.

what's the shelf life of tape under optimal storage conditions?