Thought people might find this interesting.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/

 

Thanks korith!  Their reports are always interesting.

 

Shouldn't that be BackBlaze in the topic title?

I got really excited when I first saw the numbers because the 4TB Red's had a 0% failure rate! Until I noticed that they are only running 46 of them.

 

Oh well, 0% is 0%!

"none of our drives spin down"

 

With over 50,000 drives this is a lot of power wasted. Especially when the spin up time is less than 10 seconds

 

A bit of optimization to put the most likely files to be restored on always spinning media could minimize the impact.

Waste of internet bandwidth, these reports.  BackBlaze run desktop dries in just about the worst way possible (multiples in one chassis, running 24/7).  Their data is meaningless to Joe Public.

"none of our drives spin down"

 

With over 50,000 drives this is a lot of power wasted. Especially when the spin up time is less than 10 seconds

 

A bit of optimization to put the most likely files to be restored on always spinning media could minimize the impact.

 

These guys aren't dunces. I'm sure if it were that simple they would have done it.

Thanks korith!  Their reports are always interesting.

 

Shouldn't that be BackBlaze in the topic title?

 

hehe, thanks not sure what I was thinking.

 

Well the numbers are of some use I think. When I see a drive for sale, the first thing I usually do is look for reviews on newegg and other sites and forums, to see how they compare. Hard to judge sometimes, since people are more likely to post a negative review than a positive one. Sometimes it's easy to see from all the postings on various forums, on models of drives that are having issues. For me, I like having data or some numbers to look at. Sure our home setups are most likely never run in heavy setups like they do, but the data does help give an idea of the models of drives to avoid.

For home users purchasing drives one or two at a time occasionally, the numbers don't really help much. How your individual drive has been handled since manufacturing has much more to say about longevity than the bulk failure percentages. That said, it's always nice to be on the best possible side of all the numbers. Keep in mind that even the worst performing drives in the bunch had a majority of drives that did work fine. 25% failure rate means 75 out of 100 were still working, and even the best performing drives on the market will fail eventually, it's just down to when it will happen.