Backblaze Drive Stats for Q2 2025 | Hacker News Reader

Backblaze Drive Stats for Q2 2025

backblaze.com

Be warned, there are fraudulent sellers on Amazon that sell used drives from this list as new. For example, I ordered two of these drives https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KPL474H. They were both sold as new and arrived in sealed anti-static bags. First one was DOA and the second one's SMART data showed power-on hours of ~3 years!

I reported to Amazon and wrote a review but they took my review down for calling it fraud.

> Be warned, there are fraudulent sellers on Amazon

If you're one of today's 10,000 learning this for the first time, congratulations.

For everyone else, this is a reminder that you probably shouldn't use Amazon for anything that goes in or on your body, that has properties that change over time and use (this case), that has value high enough to be worth counterfeiting, or that you want to be usable within the first round or two with customer support.

I'm very happy to see this. I was under the impression that BB was not going to publish more of these.

Yev from Backblaze here -> we LOVE this series (and so do a lot of folks in the industry) - Drive Stats Guru Emeritus Andy did retire, but we have a new team that's adding some interesting observations and data breakdowns into the mix.

Why do the tables have left-aligned numbers and set in a proportional font?

Numbers should be right-aligned and use a font where the digits are monospaced.

Yev from Backblaze here -> I'll forward that to our drive stats team to consider!

Would be interesting yo have sth like this for cars

Here you go. Statistics from Swedish Insurance company Länsförsäkringar : https://www-lansforsakringar-se.translate.goog/stockholm/pri...

That would be much harder to do for an individual company. It's more in the territory of national safety and government administration.

Afaik NHTSA tracks safety-related defects and recalls but they don't publish "failure rates". It would be nice if they did.

I noticed there are no 18TB drives in use. I've got six WD181KFGX drives which have been running well for over two years. These drives use helium and they have a five year warranty. I wonder if they'll all fail at once...

Seems the legend in the 3-way 20+ TB graph is all wrong, confused me for a bit. Fortunately the differing max ages makes it obvious which is which.

Hi - Pat from Backblaze here - we got the same heads up from a couple of folks, and corrected the graph already. Thanks for noticing!

Disappointing that all the tables of data are images

Search for "download" on the page and you'll find a link to downloading all the data, including drive types with too few data points to be included in the tables.

This makes me want to comment that the first thing I noticed on the page is two white rectangles on the second image (under "Drive Stats by the numbers") are not top-aligned.

Regarding tables: using monospace typefaces and padding floats with zeros to better align numbers make them easier to visually compare at a glance. Compare the difference the alignment of the AFR column of the two first big tables makes.

Just paste the pic into an LLM and ask for a data format.

A hurdle but not a big one nowadays.

Good news as the advancement of HDD slows.

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I'm in need of petabyte-class storage for basic web usability and sovereignty. Have you ever tried recording everything your browser views? It'll fill up a terabyte very quickly. Now, what if you want to go back and see something you browsed before? Your browser history is incomplete due to the way HTML5 works. Mobile browsers routinely delete your history. Twitter loves to refresh and make it i possible to find a tweet you've seen, etc. You want to see that page you saw last week talking about gizmo breakthrough X? Good luck, Google is no help.

Saving everything automatically that you browse, this is extremely powerful. I feel the outrage against Microsoft recall is largely artificial because of how useful this is for users. They don't want us to have access to powerful desktop tools. This makes synthesizing narratives much more difficult and perfect memory is very bad for this.

Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next product.

> I feel the outrage against Microsoft recall is largely artificial because of how useful this is for users

It solves a problem for a small subset of users while creating a problem for all other users. The outrage you see is simply some of the other users objecting. It's artificial only if you think your needs and wants are the only "real" ones.

AI has quickly become the biggest new tech industry, I don't think you're correct.

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