this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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Sure, YMMV for any statistical study but it’s also the best source that exists for stats on consumer Hard Drives tested at scale.
It's absolutely useful data, but there are a bunch of caveats that are easy to ignore.
For example, it's easy to sort by failure rate and pick the manufacturer with the lowest number. But failures are clustered around the first 18 months of ownership, so this is more a measure of QC for these drives and less of a "how long will this drive last" thing. You're unlikely to be buying those specific drives or run them as hard as Backblaze does.
Also, while Seagate has the highest failure rates, they are also some of the oldest drives in the report. So for the average user, this largely impacts how likely they are to get a bad drive, not how long a good drive will likely last. The former question matters more for a storage company because they need to pay people to handle drives, whereas a user cares more about second question, and the study doesn't really address that second question.
The info is certainly interesting, just be careful about what conclusions you draw. Personally, as long as the drive has >=3 year warranty and the company honors it without hassle, I'll avoid the worst capacities and pick based on price and features.
You’re correct, but this is pretty much “Statistics 101”. Granted most people are really bad at interpreting statistics, but I recommend looking at Backblaze reports because nothing else really comes close.
I agree it's good data, but good data isn't particularly useful if you don't know how to interpret it. It seems to largely answer questions I don't have, and finding relevant answers is a bit harder since the data is focused on datacenter use.
So I personally look for support quality first (very imprecise, but I look for anecdotes about good and bad customer experience) and avoid the capacities that seem to have consistently high failure rates and low average age in Backblaze data (e.g. 10TB drives). In the past, they largely used consumer drives (not even NAS drives), and now they largely use enterprise drives, neither of which I'm planning to buy anyway, so the main commonality between drives I'll consider and drives they monitor are the platters, hence the focus on capacity.
I'm glad they publish it, I just think people misinterpret it more often than not.