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.
Yeah, usually by the time you know a specific model is or isn't "good" the mfg has changed production or how things are laid out in the products themselves. Over time, you can glean that some mfg have been better or worse overall than others though, but that's not a promise of future efforts.
All the same, it's definitely cool and interesting to see. I've had some good and some very bad luck with storage drives over the years. I still think twice about Seagate drives since I had 6 out of 8 of their 3tb enterprise models go bad relatively quickly a decade and a half ago, specifically bought through separate vendors. I also had the first IBM Deskstar drives, the second died before the first could be RMA'd (raid1 isn't backup).
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.
What it buys is long-term good will. Engineers will see they know their stuff and suggest them as a solution for projects and people.
That said, all it would take is for the wrong leadership to start cutting corners to undo all of this hard work.
This is the main reason I use them for their S3 compatible storage service over their competitors. While its not enterprise level revenue, I still like to think it makes a difference.
> 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.
The Backblaze stock has taken a beating over the years. Recently I saw some news that there were issues with financial reporting (and fraud?). So it’s anybody’s guess as to what may happen or if the company would even be around (as it exists now) in the next decade.
I’d guess they may already have tools in place to prepare the stats and charts, leaving some amount of writing as manual work (which could or would probably be offloaded to generative AI). But analyzing the reliability of drives and publishing the data could also be seen as a competitive advantage when comparing with newer companies (positive and negative).
is there any danger this data is biased? Everything good gets corrupted eventually (amazon reviews, consumer reports, ..). is it possible they get some kickbacks for positive reviews ?
It's always possible. But I haven't seen anything that would imply this to be the case so far in all the years I've been reading this.
Given the upcoming 2 year enterprise data shortage coming up due to hyperscalers, I'm curious how this will affect Backblaze.
That is SSD/Memory.
These are HDDs.
HDDs have also been under pressure ... There was barely a month ago a article here, from somebody who setup a cluster of like half a million, with several 1000's hdds. Just to store data for AI training.
Not even two days ago there as a article of backlog on HDDs for AI. Because everybody and their grandmother wants to store the entire internet, out of fear that AI scraping will become more difficult. Aka, they are gating data. And yes, you can train AI easily on HDD even with their lower IOPS. The fact that you got a few 1000 in parallel does the trick, and its often bandwidth issues that hit harder.
I just stockpiled a few extra 4TB NVME because i learned my lesson. NVME has not been dropping in prices after the manufacture pushed it up, and AI is going to keep eating NVME storage for a long time. Let alone HDD storage...
Welcome to the new normal ... Crypto miners killing GPU prices, HDD Crypto miners, Crypto miners again back with a vengeance, O pandemic, everybody needs hardware... Short time of benefits because of over production (on NVME especially, manufacture cut back production) AAAAND .. here comes AI.
Its something every fying year.
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