![]() This is a damned small sample on the data centre drive side of the equation. Overall, the enterprise drives had 17 (4.6 per cent) failures while the consumer drives bricked 613 times (4.2 per cent). The problem is that it is comparing 14,719 drive-years of service on its consumer disks vs only 368 drive-years of service on data centre-grade drives. ![]() To compute annual failure rates, Backblaze compares failures per "drive-years of service", which is the number of each type of drive they have multiplied by years of service – simple, eh? Take the data centre vs consumer drive failure rate statistic, for example. Yikes! We should stay away from Seagate, then, right? AnalysisĪ bit of digging into the firm's analysis reveals that the foundations underlying the Backblaze conclusions aren’t all that sturdy. The results were pretty stark, with an “Annual Failure Rate” chart that showed Hitachi drives at less than 2 per cent WD spinners at around 3 per cent and Seagate drives at an astounding 14 per cent for the 1.5TB flavour, ~9 per cent for 3TB, and a high 3.8 per cent or so for the 4GB version. Post #1e0f.The bottom line, according to Beach, is that consumer drives are a better choice (even after factoring in the longer enterprise warranty) due to their higher reliability and lower cost.Įven more contentious is the last blog, which showed Backblaze failure rates by drive manufacturer. No reproduction without permission in part or whole. Now that such an impressive milestone has been reached, would this not be the time to demonstrate that a trade-off between instant restore and efficiency can be made?Ĭopyright (c) 2007-2020 Brookend Limited. I’m sure Backblaze has statistics on data access profiles and can identify exactly which data continues to remain unused year after year. Tapes don’t need constant power and will last 30+ years when treated correctly. Can IT organisations (and social media platforms) continue to justify keeping data online forever, just in case that 0.0001% of the customer base requires a restore?Īt 30TB compressed capacity, LTO-8 would offer a better TCO than disk. Then there’s the question of the environment. ![]() However, power, cooling and space costs dictate that scaling on disk can’t go on forever. TapeĪt what point does a medium like tape become financially viable? The idea of having any customer backup available online for an instant restore is appealing. Backblaze will have to continue to expand their footprint to address demand. However, looking at the growth rates quoted in this Backblaze blog post, new customer data is exceeding the speed at which vendors are releasing higher capacity drives. Western Digital are introducing 20TB HDDs, with the future promise of 100TB capacities not far into the future. ![]() #Backblaze blog archive#I’d go as far as to suggest that most consumer customers can’t even remember what data they had over five years ago.ĭoes it make sense to continually store archive data on disk? You could look at this question in two ways.įirstly, as HDD capacities continue to increase, then older drives will be phased out and replaced with newer, higher capacity models. Over time, the chances of a restore from 5-10 years ago will diminish rapidly. Much of the data being stored would be only weeks or months old. In the early days of the platform, this made sense. The Backblaze model assumes customers may want to restore any historical backup data at any time. However, for any organisation, managing growth to the exabyte level introduces challenges in optimisation and making sure resources aren’t being wasted. Generally, this can be simply the amount of data in primary storage, not including any backup. Many large enterprises and other companies that store vast quantities of data are already familiar with exabyte-size volumes of information. As a guide, Western Digital shipped 383 exabytes in 2019. That’s about 50,000 of today’s highest capacity hard drives. ![]() There’s a handy visualisation blog post on the Backblaze website that helps put the number into context, but as a simple comparison, one exabyte = 1000 petabytes. That’s an achievement in itself, but with 125,000 hard drives under management, does this now justify some active data optimisation? ExabyteĪn exabyte certainly sounds like a lot of data. Backblaze, a data protection and cloud storage company has announced they are storing more than 1 exabyte of customer data. ![]()
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