Edit: By "some flavor" I mean hardware or software.
If I have 3 disks to devote to backup, I'd rather have 1 local copy and two remote copies, vs 1 local copy with RAID and 1 remote copy without.
The third copy is in the cloud, write/append only. More work and bandwidth cost to restore, but it protects against malware or fire. So it's for a different (unlikely) scenario.
The amount of personally generated sensitive data that doesn't fit on a laptop's onboard storage (which should all be backed up offsite as well) will usually fit on like a 12TB RAID-1 pair, which is easier to back up than 40TB+ of movies.
It's not the backing up part that's expensive.
I would not be surprised if you decided to spend the dozen hours of your time after all.
Standard S3 is $23/TB/mo. Backblaze B2 is $6/TB/mo. S3 Glacier Instant or Flexible Retrieval is about $4/TB/mo. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is about $1/TB/mo.
I take it you have ~2TB in deep archive? I have 5TB in Backblaze and I've been meaning to prune it way down.
Edit: these are raw storage costs and I neglected transfer. Very curious as my sibling comment mentioned it.
The average person watches more than 3 hours of TV/video per day, and 1 gigabyte per hour is on the low end of 1080p quality. Multiply those together and you'd need 1TB per year. 5TB per year of higher quality 1080p wouldn't be an outlier.
Is that including ads too? And sports/news?
EDIT: Wait, are these "average person" or "average American?"
https://uk.themedialeader.com/tv-viewing-time-in-europe-ahea...
https://www.finder.com/uk/stats-facts/tv-statistics
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/daily-tv-watching-time...
"In a survey conducted in India in January 2022, respondents of age 56 years and above spent the most time watching television, at an average of over three hours per day."
https://www.medianews4u.com/young-india-spends-96-min-per-da...
For china I'm seeing a bit over two and a half hours of TV in 2009, and more recently a bit over one and a half hours TV plus a bit over half an hour of streaming.
Yes it includes ads, sports, and news.
Personally I don't watch a lot of actual TV but I have youtube or twitch on half the time.
Disaster = Your DC or Cellar is flooded or burned down ;)
I also have multiple drives in operation in the past decade and didn't experience any failures. However unlike you, I didn't use backblaze's drive stats to inform my purchase. I just bought whatever was cheapest, knowing that any TCO reduction from higher reliability (at best, around 10%) would eaten up by the lack of discounts the "best" drive. That's the problem with n=1 anecdotes. You don't know whether nothing bad happened because you followed "the right advice", or you just got lucky.
Careful... that is 22 TB, not 22 TiB. Disk marketing still uses base 10. TiB is base 2.
22 TB = 20 TiB
I am becoming more and more convinced that hard drive reliability is linked to the batch more than to the individual drive models themselves. Often you will read online of people experiencing multiple failures from drives purchased from the same batch.
I cannot prove this because I have no idea about Blackblazes procurement patterns but I bought one of the better drives in this list (ST16000NM001G) and it failed within a year.
When it comes to hard drives or storage more generally a better approach is protect yourself against down time with software raid and backups and pray that if a drive does fail it does so within the warranty period.
I'll toss in on that anecdata. This has happened to me a several times. In all these cases we were dealing with drives with more or less sequential serial numbers. In two instances they were just cache drives for our CDN nodes. Not a big deal, but I sure kept the remote hands busy those weeks trying to keep enough nodes online. In a prior job, it was our primary storage array. You'd think that RAID6+hot spare would be pretty robust, but 3 near simultaneous drive failures made a mockery of that. That was a bad day. The hot spare starting doing its thing with the first failure, and if it had finished rebuilding before the subsequent failures, we'd have been ok, but alas.
Like, 25+ years ago I would've bought hard drives for just my personal usage in a software raid making sure I don't get consecutive serial numbers, but ones that are very different. I'd go to my local hardware shop and ask them specifically for that. They'd show me the drives / serial numbers before I ever even bought them for real.
I even used different manufacturers at some point when they didn't have non consecutive serials. I lost some storage because the drives weren't exactly the same size even though the advertized size matched, but better than having the RAID and extra cost be for nothing.
I can't fathom how anyone that is running drives in actual production wouldn't have been doing that.
I mostly just buy multiple brands from multiple vendors. And size the partitions for mdadm a bit smaller.
But even the same model where it's 2 each from bestbuy, Amazon, newegg, microcenter, seems to get me a nice assortment of variety.
Of course, learned experience has value in the long term for a reason.
I rescued what could be rescued at a few KB/s read speed and then checked the serial numbers...
I just get 1/3 Toshiba, 1/3 WD, 1/3 Seagate.
Moving to software storage systems (ZFS, StorageSpaces, etc.) has saved my butt so many times.
Don’t know about disk batches, though. Took used old second hand drives. (Many different batches due to procurement timelines.) Half of them was thrown out because they were clicky. All were tested with S.M.A.R.T. Took about a week. The ones that worked are mostly still around. Only a third of the ones that survived S.M.A.R.T. have failed so far.
Whats funny is that about a year ago I ended up installing FreeBSD onto the same Microserver and ran a 5 x 500GB mirror for my most precious data. The drives were ancient but not a single failure.
As someone who never played with hardware raid ZFS blows my mind. The drive that failed was a non issue because the pool it belongs to was a pool with a single vdev (4 disk mirror). Due to the location of the server I had to shut down the system to pull the drive but yeah I think that was 2 weeks later. If this was the old days I would have had to source another drive and copy the data over.
Every time I think I might need a feature in a file system it seems to have it.
The drives are spaced apart by empty drive slots and have a 12cm case fan cranked to max blowing over it at all times.
It is in a tower though so maybe it was bumped at some time and that caused the issue. Being in the top slot this would have had the greatest effect on the drive. I doubt it though.
Usage is low and the drives are spinning 24/7.
Still I think I am cursed when it comes to Seagate.
The NVMe drives in my servers have these little aluminium cases on them as part of the hotswap assembly. They manage the temperature differential by using a conductive pad for the controller, but not the flash.
By the time Backblaze has a sufficient number of a particular model and sufficient time lapsed to measure failures, the drive is an obsolete model, so the report cannot really inform my decision for buying new drives. These are new drive stats, so not sure it is that useful for buying a used drive either, because of the bathtub shaped failure rate curve.
So the conclusion I take from this report is that when a new drive comes out, you have no way to tell if it's going to be a good model, a good batch, so better stop worrying about it and plan for failure instead, because you could get a bad/damaged batch of even the best models.
Worked in a component test role for many years. It's all of the above. We definitely saw significant differences in AFR across various models, even within the same product line, which were not specific to a batch. Sometimes simply having more or less platters can be enough to skew the failure rate. We didn't do in depth forensics models with higher AFRs as we'd just disqualify them and move on, but I always assumed it probably had something to do with electrical, mechanical (vibration/harmonics) or thermal differences.
Home use is also much more likely to suffer from unexpected adverse conditions that impact all the drives in the array simultaneously.
With ZFS on Debian the default is to scrub monthly (second Sunday) and resilvering is not more stressful than that. The entire drive contents (not allocated space) has to be read to re-silver.
Also define "high chance." Is 10% high? 60%? I've replaced failed drives or just ones I wanted to swap to a larger size at least a dozen times and never had a concurrent failure.
Probably it also matters if you get a bulky 3.5" HDD when all you need is a small flash chip with a few GB of persistent storage — the devil is in the details but I simply didn't realise this could be a part of the decision process
It seems unlikely to me that in a full lifecycle accounting the spinning rust would come out ahead.
It sounded really comprehensive besides having to make assumptions about standard usage patterns, but then the usage is like 10% of the lifetime emissions so it makes a comparatively small difference if I'm a heavy gamer or leave it to sit and collect dust: 90% remains the same
> If this is really a significant concern for you
It literally affects everyone I'm afraid and simply not knowing about it (until now) doesn't stop warming either. Yes, this concerns everyone, although not everyone has the means to do something about it (like to buy the cleaner product)
It turns out that modern hard drives have a specified workload limit [1] - this is an artifact of heads being positioned at a low height (<1nm) over the platter during read and write operations, and a "safe" height (10nm? more?) when not transferring data.
For an 18TB Exos X18 drive with a specified workload of 550TB read+write per year, assuming a lifetime of 5 years[2] and that you never actually read back the data you wrote, this would be at max about 150 drive overwrites, or a total of 2.75PB transferred.
In contrast the 15TB Solidigm D5-P5316, a read-optimized enterprise QLC drive, is rated for 10PB of random 64K writes, and 51PB of sequential writes.
[1] https://products.wdc.com/library/other/2579-772003.pdf
[2] the warrantee is 5 years, so I assume "<550TB/yr" means "bad things might happen after 2.75PB". It's quite possible that "bad things" are a lot less bad than what happens after 51PB of writes to the Solidigm drive, but if you exceed the spec by 18x to give you 51PB written, I would assume it would be quite bad.
And in your particular situation, 3 refurbished WUH721414ALE6L4 are the same total price. If you put those in RAIDZ1 then that's 28TB with about as much reliability as you can hope to have in a single device. (With backups still being important but that's a separate topic.)
What do you mean by cycle?
The amount of time they stay on a single drive.
Note, disk failure rates and raid or similar solutions should be used when establishing an availability target, not for protecting against data loss. If data loss is a concern, the approach should be to use back ups.
But yes, I've done the math. I'm just going with the BB numbers here, and after a few years it adds up. The way I understand "peace of mind", you can't have it with a single drive. Nice and simple.
Whether that's right or wrong, when I talked about 5% failure chance per cycle that's what I meant. And 5% is probably an underestimate.
If you're regularly testing your drive's ability to be heavily loaded for a few hours, you don't have much chance of failure during a rebuild.
My most recent drive is a WDC WUH722222ALE6L4 22TiB, and looking at the stats (albeit only a few months of data), and overall trend of WDC, in this report gives me peace of mind that it should be fine for the next few years until it's time for the cycle to repeat.