#Backblaze blog reliability archive#

Most of our drive activity is light weight - we archive data for goodness sake, we write the data once then maybe read it once per month to make sure the data has not been corrupted.

I'm curious if anybody has any other suggested differences with 'what you will see'. So if you leave your drives powered off most of the time and boot them only sometimes, the failure rates we see may or may not be something like yours? > very unlike the type of use case you will likely seeīeing extremely specific - we (Backblaze) keep the drives powered up and spinning 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Now they just need to add confidence interval to the graphs.

And you can see that like I said, there's huge variability in reliability between models within a manufacturer's lineup. (You can pretty much ignore WD in the 4TB graph, as a sample size of just 46 drives means the confidence interval is a 0.3% - 8.8% failure rate.)Īt least Blackblaze addressed my criticism from before - they've broken down the stats to individual drive models. It's skewed this time by one bad model, which due to the passage of time means it makes up a tiny portion of their Seagate sample, so doesn't spike Seagate's score like before. The Seagate stats in the previous report were probably being skewed by just one or two bad models. Well, WD was least reliable this time around. But everyone was eager to get on the bash Seagate, praise WD bandwagon and ignored me. Sometimes it doesn't and the model is unreliable. Sometimes it works and the model is reliable. I tried to warn them that the model of the drive mattered more than the manufacturer, because each manufacturer tries new technologies and new cost-cutting strategies with each different model. Can't help but feel for all the people who read Blackblaze's previous report and decided Seagate was junk and bought WD instead.

Backblaze blog reliability