"because reasons" is an overly negative way to say "because they offer the best value"

They can get large numbers of them cheap, and their system is good at detecting and replacing bad drives, so why not use them?

In my head it wasn't negative, it was that there are a lot of reasons that I don't think needed to be gone into. Offering value is one, having systems that are designed to minimize the impact of failures is another. Others that came to mind when I wrote that include: Being able to get them at the quantities they need, having systems that reduce the COST of failures (drive replacement and RMA), cost of RMAing 10 drives is < 10x the cost of RMAing 1 drive, having drives available in the SIZES Backblaze wants. And there are others I could speculate about but don't have as concrete information on (vendor relationships, manufacturer relationships, marketshare, firmware quality/suitability, temperature).

Maybe it's just my social/business groups, but "because reasons" doesn't have to have a negative meaning. I use it as more a statement of fact: There are reasons for this.

hmmm, I always thought "because reasons" was sarcastic, as in the person would list reasons but they are all bullshit. Of course, sarcasm can be impossible to discern correctly on Internet forums and social media. I admit I could be completely wrong about this.

Sarcasm tends to depend on context, tone, and delivery. It is particularly difficult to interpret in written commentary such as blogs like this.

If I had to guess, the seagates are sufficiently cheap in ridiculous quantities, and Backblaze's multi-pod redundancy/parity and drive monitoring is good enough, that even if they have a 3% failure rate and the HGSTs have a 0.75% failure rate, that it's still an acceptable risk for them.

If you're an individual person with a 12-drive ZFS RAIDZ2 with hotspare, in a file server in your garage or something, you might prefer to pay the premium to buy HGST, because what if you have a double drive failure during a three week period while you're on vacation out of the country?

Especially if you're an individual person with a non-raid6 / hot spare system, you might pay a premium for a lower failure rate (standalone drive, RAID1, or RAID5, for example).

Although in the year 2019 it would be pretty reckless to use RAID5 without hotspare. Or even RAID5 with hotspare. This has been true for a long, long time:

https://www.google.com/search?&q=why+raid5+stops+working&ie=...

I'm certainly not advocating for it.

> HGST doesn't fail a lot, but we also have statistically insignificant numbers of them, so <shrug>."

They have over 20 thousand HGST drives now, according to this year's report, which seems significant to me.

They continue to have lower failure rates than the Seagates.

It will be when the drives they just added have had more time in use. The best part of this is that them adding those drives signifies that they were on the market at good prices to add; competition is a good thing for consumers.

"Seagates fail kind of a lot..."

That Seagate 10 TB was the singular standout in terms of reliability. Maybe it is worth checking out.

If there's one thing I've learned from seeing these reports over the years, it's that the specific drive model matters more than the brand.

Yeah. There was that one Seagate 3tb a few years back. I think they had a 26% afr before yanking all of them.

Your comment is frankly incredibly arrogant - "I can't be bothered to click and skim through the short post, so hurry up and summarize the contents for me."

Ten people give their opinions, as requested. One person thinks you're arrogant and tells you so.

You can't argue with results.

What's the old line? If you have a problem with your Linux system, don't post asking how to fix it because you'll get nothing; post saying how Linux sucks because this thing doesn't work and you'll get a dozen replies in an hour.

Sometimes, personality dynamics cause certain approaches to work better than one might prefer. :)

It’s the JWZ Lazyweb

With two categories A and B you don't need the same number in each category to compare whether they come from the same distribution.

I would be surprised if the number of drives they have is actually "statistically insignificant" \* but I haven't crunched the numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson%27s_chi-squared_test

\* By this I guess you mean that the null hypothesis of "they have the same failure rate" is not rejected.

Haven't read this one yet, but Seagates from what I saw in these tended to be okay. It was Western Digital that had, surprisingly, the most issue (which is unfortunate, considering I finally figured out the cheaper method using Best Buy for WD Red disks).

Granted, I'm not a hardware guy so my takeaway could've been wrong, but that's what it looked like to me when reading them.

No, the opportunity to do a better analysis hasn't gone away.