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Yev here -> Yes, that's basically the trade-off for us. Is the drive available and reliable vs. how much does it cost. One of the reasons we have so many Seagate drives is because they are available in abundance, are affordable for us, and have failure rates in-line with the other drives that we're testing.

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I'm theorizing that one of the things Backblaze has optimized is the labor cost of drive replacement, yes?

So the reliability may be "worth more" to someone who pays a lot for remote-hands in a server farm somewhere, but not in this case.

Yev here -> we do have remote hands available in some cases, but we try to have our own teams in place where possible, but yes - it's one of the things we optimize on our end!

To what extent do you guys maintain drive diversity artificially? i.e. include higher % seagates just to diversify risk of one batch/type being bad news.

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