Re:Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
by cm2187 on Wednesday February 12, 2025 @03:34AM
(#43023163)
Well to me the report is mostly useful to illustrate the volatility of hard drive failure. It isn't a particular manufacturer or line of disks, it's all over the place.
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.
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.