Backblaze Drive Stats: 2018 Q3 Hard Drive Failure Rates
backblaze.com
backblaze.com
Looks like backblaze will cross the exabyte mark very soon. They crossed 500 PB in February [1].
Yev, in case you're around, I was curious what your plan was for a potential future shortage of supply of hard drives due to another disaster, political problem, etc. Perhaps just grow far enough ahead of your needs to have a buffer? I imagine you're now at a scale where you can't farm hard drives from costco anymore.
Also what happens to all of those functional, but non-profitable 4TB drives?
[1]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/50...
EDIT: PS- fun story! I enjoyed reading it except for all the social media buttons.
Looks like Firefox's reader view fixes it, I'll just need to get in the habit of using that instead of the Kill Sticky Headers bookmarklet as things catch on and circumvent it... https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
I can only assume the thought process of whoever writes these social bars is "People are hiding our share buttons instead of clicking them! MAYBE IF WE SHOVE IT IN THEIR FACES REPEATEDLY THEY'LL LIKE THAT BETTER AND WANT TO SHARE!"
Gruber sums up my feelings nicely: https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars
Useful for whom? The user, or website operator?
Snark aside, do the sharebars actually increase user engagement on your site?
That can be gamed though, but we keep ours "natural".
Ironically, that site is perhaps more unreadable than a typical medium page. It uses some hardcoded mobile format (?) that shows tiny text in the middle 20% of my 16:9 screen.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=500, minimum-scale=0.45" />
This isn't the same class of drive. Supposedly what's inside the STEB8000100 is a ST8000AS0002 5900 RPM archive drive. But that drive, which you can barely even find anymore, is over $200.
What's up with this pricing?
FYI I have nothing to do with the site, just a user.
> $33,500 if you bought them from amazon right now
About half of all of the money that flows into Backblaze from customers gets spent on the datacenter, and the largest component of that is drives. I think sales tax and property tax is the second largest datacenter component. It turns out you don't just owe property tax on buildings and land - if you own something of significant worth like $10 million worth of hard drives in a large pile, you owe the government "property tax" every month for owning that property.
If you're Intel, you potentially owe "property tax" every month on all the equipment in multi-billion dollar fabs. That's why those fabs only get built in states where the tax doesn't apply or where the state/county agrees to forego it.
> Do BB publish pricing of what they paid for drives? ... a TB/$/Failure rate
Thank you, that is EXACTLY the correct way to look at the failure statistics! So many people seem to sort the list by failure rate and think no matter what the cost, the lowest failure rate wins. For Backblaze, we just feed it back into the cost calculation. For example:
If a drive fails 1% more often but is 2% cheaper in total cost of ownership, we buy that drive. Now, total cost of ownership includes the physical space rental so more dense drives can be more expensive per TByte in raw drive cost because we can make some of that back up in physical space rental. Also, most drives seem to take about the same amount of electricity unrelated to how many TBytes are contained inside, so double the drive density is like saying it takes half as much electricity over its 4 - 5 year lifespan. Electricity is one of our largest datacenter costs, so we keep an eye on that also.
But to answer your very first question, unfortunately we cannot release the price we paid for the drives due to the vendors requesting we don't disclose prices. But don't think we have some magically huge discount or anything. Most of the time we are literally paying about retail, maybe a 3% - 5% discount for buying in bulk orders of over 10,000 drives. But for reasons nobody at Backblaze can figure out, sometimes a bunch of new drives appears randomly at a really good discount price, then returns to the original price the next month. It might be some attempt along the supply chain to boost monthly or quarterly top line at the expense of profits, I don't know.
I'd honestly pay double if I could be guaranteed to avoid all that.
There are legal reasons some companies might need to keep their data within the EU, and for others having multi-region backups are a checkbox to tick off on disaster preparations. Both are things the marketing department should use.
> What does Backblaze do with all its older hard drives? Resell? Recycle?
If the drive is still working (like you can read and write to it) when we cycle it out, we securely wipe it and then sometimes resell them in "bulk" to places like "Weird Stuff Warehouse" in the San Francisco area, or other places.
If the drive is not working, we physically destroy the hard drives (special equipment) and dispose/recycle the electronic waste of the carcass.
Is that as fun a day as I'm picturing?
When I worked for a defense contractor we started one of our daily infosec briefings with a video of one of our shipyards destroying a few hundred hard drives. They put them all in a shipyard size press brake. The end result was very long line of C shaped hard drives.
Anyone who deals with enough drives and doesn't have other business (like a shipyard) that they can borrow suitable equipment from will likely wind up buying an industrial shredder.[1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shiRKLw5qVI
Hint: any hydraulic press would do, albeit a tad bit slower.
Google actually recently upgraded to using a robotic arm to manage the wiping and shredding of drives. [0]
[0] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/robots-n...
For many businesses, crushing the disk makes better business sense than take the risk that they have historically lost encryption keys and are now about to hand their data away to an attacker.