I'm not a customer of Backblaze, but I really love how they publish this data for the public. I wish more companies did this kind of thing.
I'm not a really big expert on your file system. How easy is it for you to replace a faulty drive? Just pop it out and put in a brand new one, even if it's other capacity and/or brand and/or model? Is firmware upgrade of harddisks supported?
Sometimes i wonder if it's possible to make a sort of small consumer (nas4free?) edition of the storage pod. Must be awesome to use almost any drive and still have a reliable big nas at home.
There are still some rough edges, but it's overall a pretty nice setup for me. I setup the virtual drive to require at least 2 copies of the data on the underlying disks (but there are options for 3 copies and more I believe), and then you can add and remove disks to the array kind of whenever you want. They can be different speeds, sizes, whatever.
Of the drives installed in 2012, by 2015 32% had failed, 62% were removed out of caution for failing some diagnostics, and 6% were still in place.
Not worth the risk to save $20. I have no way of knowing if Seagate fixed the issues and kept producing them or if they're still trying to dump old stock of bad drives.
Thanks, Backblaze!
EDIT: Ah, I see that you meant you're turned off by 3tb Seagates in general. You could just look at the model number.
Got a decent deal on an HGST a few weeks later,
Home users should just backup their important stuff and buy whatever they want. A super reliable drive won't save them from an accidental drop, a fire or theft.
I imagine most of their drives don't even see much traffic if they're used for backups. Write once, read rarely. I wonder how B2 changes that equation.
That being said, I will never ever buy a Seagate HDD again. They joined Maxtor in my blacklist a long time ago. I lost every single one I ever bought (and RMAed) within a year.
I basically just have a cron job setup to run b2 sync at 2am, and then kill it at 8am. It generally doesn't take that long to run now, but when I was first syncing everything (couple hundred GB) this allowed it to take place over several days without affecting my daytime bandwidth.
Btw, they should include Amazon Glacier on the pricing page comparison, not just S3.
What is it missing that Crashplan and Backblaze Personal Backup have?
$5/mo of B2 is about 1TB of storage, so if you're above that then maybe cost is a factor?
It's cheaper then backblaze, slightly. It's not really comparable, because it's not distributed and there is real risk of data loss. However, for my needs, it works as part of a comprehensive backup plan. I get a bit more bang for my buck and more flexibility.
Seems to work OK so far. Won't be as cheap as their unlimited plan but I'm OK with that.
I'd have to say the 30 day retention policy is one of the main issues. I'd also add their lack of restore in their client myself is a big issue.
> It's like a gift.
We're glad you like it! It isn't hard for us, and we get a little press out of it so it is TOTALLY worth it for us to do. Once we setup all the analysis scripts to pull the data, it's mostly just an automated system.
What baffles me is why nobody else reports drive failure stats? I mean, people hear about Backblaze and buy our product because we're providing this data, why don't any OTHER companies want this free stream of customers?
I have no idea why and am wondering too. Maybe a tradition of closeness, or they didn't think it would matter to anyone. Also I think hard drives are a special case because drive reviews are rare if non existant nowadays; and you need large amounts of them to do analysis. Which until companies like your came, was probably relegated to big business only; unlike today where cloud storage is mainstream so the average joe may be involved...
I think more sectors should have automated statistics like these; consumer struggles to assess the quality of goods; relying on adhoc comments or tiny (paid) reviews...
Amazon, Microsoft and Google probably have too much to lose from calling-out the vendors of poorly performing drives and the ever-present risk of a lawsuit - which is probably the overriding concern: if Contoso Storage Ltd had a single bad batch that coincidentally Azure used for their storage operations, they'd report a on-the-whole inaccurate failure rate, and Contoso's revenue and stock price would dip accordingly.
Given the size, scale and marketing of AWS, Azure and Google's Cloud services respectively I don't think them publishing their hardware failure rates would positively affect their cloud services revenues any detectable amount - all for more work to analyse and publish the findings and the subsequent liability.
My wild-ass guess is that organisations with enough hard drives to make reliable estimates give performance/failure data to whoever installed/designed the arrays (who i imagine get some competitive advantage from knowing which drives fail) and so there's probably a pretty serious culture of secrecy around this stuff.
Where you do see it is when relations are strained, see for example YouTube bandwidth reports.