Okay...interesting to me at least.

I highly recommend reading the full posts and comments.

While it's great that Backblaze is so open about their operations as regards the hard drives used in their data centers, the ultimate bottom line is that they are promoting their service and how their customer's data is kept secure and intact.

"Alas, Poor Stephen is Dead …or what it takes to be a Backblaze hard drive."

Full report here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/alas-poor-stephen-is-dead-2/

Backblaze doesn't just pull a drive from the box and put in into service. There's rigorous testing before they're used.

Excerpts of interest:

"One of the observations we’ve seen over the years is that if a Hitachi drive is going to fail during the load test, it will usually fail early and hard – it just dies. On the other hand if a Seagate drive is going to fail during a load test, it will usually fail later on in the test and often it fails soft, meaning it continues to operate but one or more of its SMART attributes are out of compliance."

"Stephen We Hardly Knew Ye

Stephen [the Segate - lingyi] failed during load testing. In typical Seagate fashion he failed towards the end of the load test. Not typical to Seagate drives, he failed hard and died hard. He was a rebel. He was degaussed and recycled by a local school’s PTA e-cycle program and hopefully lives on as a blender or a beer can. Long live Stephen."

Comments: Since those Hitachi drives that are included the 2014 and 2015 reports have already passed their most common failure point, it may be the reason for their low failure rate in use. Conversely, the Seagates are typically failing slowly and showing this trait.

"Hard Drive SMART Stats"

Full report here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-smart-stats/

What SMART parameters Backblaze uses to determine when a drive "fails"

Excerpts of interest:

"I’ve shared a lot of Backblaze data about hard drive failure statistics. While our system handles a drive failing, we prefer to predict drive failures, and use the hard drives’ built-in SMART metrics to help. The dirty industry secret? SMART stats are inconsistent from hard drive to hard drive.

With nearly 40,000 hard drives and over 100,000,000 GB of data stored for customers, we have a lot of hard-won experience. See which 5 of the SMART stats are good predictors of drive failure below. And see the data we have started to analyze from all of the SMART stats to see which other ones predict failure."

"Backblaze uses SMART 5, 187, 188, 197 and 198 for determining the failure or potential failure of a hard drive. We would love to use more – ideally the drive vendors would tell us exactly what the SMART attributes mean. Then we, and the rest of the storage community, could examine the data and figure out what’s going on with the drives.

In the meantime, at Backblaze, we’ll continue gathering data and working to correlate it as best we can. One thing we are looking at is to break down each SMART stat by the drive model, but there are challenges with how drive manufacturers change drive model numbers and how firmware changes occur within a given model. We’ll see if there is anything interesting and let you know."

Comments: Interesting read about how Backblaze determines when a drive has failed. Particularly interesting is that they use 5 out of 70 SMART parameters. What other parameters may be relevant to typical "real-world" home use?


"Our 6 TB Hard Drive Face-Off"

Full report here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/6-tb-hard-drive-face-off/http://

Backblaze compares 6TB WDs and Segates

Excerpts of interest:

"Evaluation

Let’s review the Seagate and Western Digital drives so far:

Initial reliability (how many drives failed) – No failures.
Running reliability (3 months) – No failures
SMART Stats (3 months) – No error conditions recorded for the 5 stats that we utilize.
Hard Drive Cost – about the same.
Energy Use – The Seagate drives were 7200 rpm and used slightly more electricity than the Western Digital drives which were 5400 rpm.
This small difference adds up when you place 45 drives in a Storage Pod and then stack 10 Storage Pods in a cabinet.
Loading speed – Edge to Western Digital, by a little over 1 TB per day on average."

"Next Step: Scaling the Test
Based on the results, we have ordered 230 Western Digital drives to fill 5 Storage Pods (with 5 spare drives). These will be installed, load tested and deployed shortly. Assuming the Western Digital drives continue to perform as well in the 5 Storage Pods, we’ll move forward with using the Western Digital 6TB drives in our Storage Pods over the coming months.

Is Seagate Shutout?
The Seagate 6TB drives performed well, albeit they loaded a little slower. They also use a little more electricity than we’d like. Still they are not shut out. We really like to have multiple qualified hard drives to order and use in our Storage Pods. Diversification is good. To that end we expect to order additional Seagate 6 TB hard drives over the coming months, build them into Storage Pods and monitor how they perform. Assuming they perform well, the 6 TB Seagate hard drives would be added to our list of qualified drives."

Comments: My personal strategy about hard drives is summed up with this quote from the above: "Diversification is good.". On my extremely small scale, I'm doing what Backblaze does. Buy based on price and be ready to swap out when the inevitable failure occurs.