Backblaze Hard Drive Lifetime Annualized 2013-2023

The Backblaze stats are nothing short of amazing, transparency-wise, and if anyone on the team making these available is reading this, many thanks to you!

That being said, truly bad series of HDDs have been extremely uncommon in the past decade. Of course, everyone is on NVMe Flash now for storage that actually matters, but I think the last epic "enterprise scale" nearline-class mess-up were the Seagate Barracude 1(.5)TB drives, introduced in 2013 and last sold in 2016?

Anyway, I've been very happy recently with some huge arrays running 14/15/18TB Western Digital SAS drives. The only (but pretty foreseeable) issue is that RAID6 arrays, once a drive in the set goes bad, simply can't be rebuilt in an acceptable timeframe.

So, standard procedure now is to have one empty RAID6-backed volume on standby at all times, so data can be migrated there from a degraded volume, after which the latter (after drive replacement) can be rebuilt from scratch.

Not an approach that would work at huge scale, but for simple-old-me, it's sufficient...

The blog post that this image is cherry picked from ("Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023") was posted 17 days ago[0] (275 points, 72 comments), not sure why this needs a duplicate post. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38263435