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Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2025

151 points by woliveirajr

by redm

0 subcomment

I've been following this report for many years, but Backblaze, as a backup service (traditionally), has very different IO patterns than many users. They originally started with consumer drives, which we found to be far too unreliable. In my experience, the BER and write cycles have a dramatic impact on overall drive performance. The MTBF declines sharply as write cycles increase, both as a percentage of IO and overall IO.
Backblaze changed IO patterns with B2, but that would be the key data for me to make this more useful: failure rate as a percentage of bytes read/written, etc.

by tempest_

5 subcomments

While I find this data interesting it isnt usually very actionable.
The skus with the lowest number immediately get bought out(if they are still available, which they are not always) and will never be available. You also always run the risk of "getting a bad batch" or just getting some drives that got beat up in shipping.
Usually this data is only useful for keeping an eye on your own stuff and prioritizing replacements when the time comes.
When buying drives I just look at the sizes I need and the performance then get 1/3rd from each of the manufacturers.

by basilgohar

6 subcomments

What Backblaze is doing here is so underrated. This a large scale, practical, in-datacenter real data on essential hardware infrastructure that is available almost nowhere else, and they provide it, and their excellent analysis, completely for free.
I miss this culture and I admire leadership that allows it to not only exist, but thrive. I fear the day a stockholder meeting occurs and someone wringing their hands see the decommissioned pennies they can save by limiting or stopping these reports.

by londons_explore

1 subcomments

My takeaway... The specific model plays a huge role in the failure rate.
A great model has a MTBF of 250 years.
A bad model might have a MTBF of just 5 years.
I suspect if you had a need for reliable storage which couldn't be met with the usual RAID approach, buying 2nd hand drives from eBay of a model and batch proven to be really reliable is probably your best bet.

by blindriver

2 subcomments

Given the upcoming 2 year enterprise data shortage coming up due to hyperscalers, I'm curious how this will affect Backblaze.