Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q1 2019
backblaze.comAs someone who runs a tiny archiving operation (about 70 hard drives) I find these stats invaluable and am so grateful to you for publishing them! You make it a lot easier to navigate an expensive and intimidating world of hardware options.
Yev here -> Glad you enjoy them! Thanks for reading!
I've enjoyed the Backblaze hard drive failure rate posts for years, but never realized they publish the underlying data! https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html (scroll down)
It looks quite detailed--a daily snapshot of all of the SMART values for each individual hard drive.
Yev here -> Glad you like it! The SMART stats are definitely entertaining for folks who want to do a deeper-dive!
I don’t know why but every time I read one I’m never disappointed. I find the data fascinating. I wish more companies would give information like this but on memory, cpus etc also.
You know, I'll bet Backblaze goes through lots of memory, cpus, etc, too. Yev? :)
Hah yes, but likely not in the quantity that would make this interesting!
How have they got 2k boot drives for 100k data drives? Are these special motherboards with 50 (!) SATA connectors on them? Or is it many machines netbooting and share-mounting root from a handful of control nodes? I get that it's backup, so most of the data is at rest most of the time, but that still seems like a really high ratio of network ports to disk drives.
Either way, interesting that the boot drives are actual drives and not SD card pairs or something, like how vSANs are often set up.
Yep, the latest pods have 60 drives:
Using 16TB drives you will get 9.6 Petabyes of storage per Pod 6.0. It would fit you circa 21,276 blu-ray rips.
You mean Linux ISOs.
The latest design has 3 4-port sata cards, with each port running to a 5-port backplane, which connect to the drives.
I'm really interested to see how those high capacity Helium-filled drives hold up over time. (i.e. I've been wondering how much leakage is going to be a problem)
Yev here -> that info should be in the SMART stats, so if you see a dip, checking there will give you a lot more context (though we'd likely call that out in our blog).
Does Backblaze have any SMR drives in use, or do you have plans to start using them? Would be really interesting to see if these exhibit a worse failure rate.
Anyway, thanks for sharing this data, I really like the openness.
Yev here -> No SMR drives in production at this point in time!
I thoroughly enjoy reading these stats every time they're released.
It's just a shame that their user interface is missing many features I want, otherwise I would use them.
I’m just glad it works, I’m a Backblaze customer:)
Yev from Backblaze -> as an employee, I'm glad it works too :D
Still waiting for the Europe datacenter so I can start my backups :)
my prediction: all four items in the list of predictions will happen.