Comments on: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2017

By: lsatenstein

lsatenstein — Tue, 25 Sep 2018 21:09:03 +0000

It would be great if we could discover the failure cause. Is it seak failures, reads/write failures, electric/electronics failures, heat (spindle failure), flaking oxide. There will be dominant failure cause, for sure.

By: Greg Shumaker

Greg Shumaker — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 21:19:28 +0000

In reply to Hickeroar. As someone who is an engineer at an HDD company. Once you start getting into 10+ writes you not only have completely wiped out the on track data, but you will eventually erase neighboring data as well. I think anything beyond 2-3x writes is overkill even if you have some incredibly important data. Although I never worked in data recovery and tried to see if we could recover overwritten data. It was more like how many writes to one area before we damage a neighboring area. The higher the frequency you overwrite the data with the better.

By: Greg Shumaker

Greg Shumaker — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 21:15:58 +0000

In reply to Darren Starr.

I’d assume the data on the drives is encrypted anyway, so even if you did buy a drive and were able to recover the data it wouldn’t have any use for anyone.

I would think they don’t sell drives because they probably don’t retire them until they start giving SMART errors. At that point they are too far gone to sell except for scrap parts anyway. Maybe they do decommission 2-3 TB drives before they die. They wouldn’t be worth selling imo.

By: Azzam

Azzam — Sun, 29 Jul 2018 14:48:08 +0000

http://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/XRgdKhS
Quality 1tb hard drive.

By: Voiptoners

Voiptoners — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 04:05:40 +0000

Yup. Hard drive failure is one of the main reasons why people tend to switch to cloud storage or backup. goodcloudstorage.net listed hardware failure as high as 40% of the data loss overall with others like disaster, virus, human error and etc.

By: bender

bender — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 16:47:00 +0000

Do you have only 7200 rpm HDDs? Do you have correlation between HDD plates/heads count and HDD failure rate? How many hours HDD operate before become metal? I seems that HDD reliability is fallen in last 3-5 years.

By: James Lee

James Lee — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 15:31:00 +0000

Could you post the result in regular html table instead of an image? Screen readers can’t read the image. I understand that the raw data is available to download, but it would be great for people with visual impairment could just read without extra steps.

Thanks!

By: Gene

Gene — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 02:28:00 +0000

ERASING data from HDDs is always problematic and controversial. Have found that ERASER 6.x which is very free, to be very effective. You can set the overwrite methods and passes from 1 to 35 passes. BUT it is a slow program, not very intuitive or easy to use, good luck is getting the app to run the first ERASE pass,(it is just not obvious how to do it!) support is extremely awful but it does work. If you want the data from the HDD really gone, remove the unit and drill holes in the drive or set fire to it etc. ANOTHER possible: encrypt all data on the HDD with a large password key (55 digits) then erase the resulting encrypted data. That data is non recoverable for sure now.

By: Gene

Gene — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 02:10:00 +0000

Below you said replaced HDDS that are now spare cannot be sold to others because they contain customer data that could be exposed. I say 100% not true. ALL customer data being stored on the companies HDD farm is fully encrypted and virtually unbreakable!!!! Sell the spare or no longer HDDs. IN all your stats delivered it is very difficult tomdetermine which brand or model of HDD is the most reliable and should guide me as to which one for me to buy in the future. HELP. Which is the most reliable? Is there a post mortem on HDDs? When HDDS fal what are the various reason for their failures!!