Pairing these cheap drives with various RAID and replication schemes provides enough integrity to safely store data.ĭuring the Thailand flooding in October 2011, Backblaze had to go to extreme lengths to procure enough drives to sustain operations. They do not use drives indiscriminately, each model goes through a short test phase to assure the drive suits their purposes. Their noble goal is to provide storage as cheaply as possible, and then pass those savings along to their customers. Let's fire up the truck and drive through the holes in this test, and explain exactly why the results shouldn't affect anyone's purchasing decision.īackblaze unabashedly sources the cheapest consumer drives they can find for storing their customers' data. However, in this case, even the winners are losers. Hitachi and Western Digital appear to be the winners, and Seagate comes in a distant third.

The Backblaze results have been tallied and placed in nice charts, and winners proclaimed. To add insult to injury, most tech websites have picked this story up and proclaimed the results as a definitive guide to drive reliability. Unfortunately, that doesn't fall in line with determining the winners or losers of HDD reliability. Reading their blog posts during the HDD crisis in 2011 is enthralling, they really do go to any length to continue operation in a cost-efficient manner. This provides us some insight into their activities. Backblaze follows the open source mentality of sharing data on their enclosures, and even share schematics so readers can build their own Backblaze servers. Further digging unearths questionable practices, at least if the goal is to gather data on drive reliability. While Backblaze is somewhat clear about the results, they don't explain the test environment, and they don't do a good job of explaining why much of their data is worthless to the typical consumer.

Backblaze blog reliability