[tempest_]

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.

[tracker1]

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).

[toast0]

Any sort of long term testing is like this. You can't know what the long term reliability of something is when you buy it. You can estimate from reliability of similar items made in the past, but even if you bought some of everything and kept it on the shelf for X years and then only used the best, the stuff aged on the shelf.

Reports like this might help drive planning for failures. It might also help validate your experience if you've had a bunch of failures with some model and they have too.

IIRC, there have been a couple models that seemed to hit a big bathtub curve style end of life (I think 6TB drives in particularl); that could be a pre-failure indicator for you if you have that model.

Otherwise, yeah, mostly not actionable, but very nice to see the data.

> When buying drives I just look at the sizes I need and the performance then get 1/3rd from each of the manufacturers.

This is a good plan, you should avoid most correlated failures from firmware and manufacturing (although there's a lot of shared supply chain, so you might not avoid all correlated failures if some common component was made improperly during a long enough time period that all three drive makers would be using it in your purchase).

[theanomaly]

While it's tough if you want new drives, I've found I could frequently get used drives on eBay that have significant history on Backblaze's report. Despite the increased risk from used drives, I've found I still end up more reliable than buying random new drives.

[warmwaffles]

I'm mainly looking at manufacturer and model failure rates in aggregate over a period of time like 6 months to determine my next purchases. As you pointed out SKUs with the lowest get slurped up and you always run the risk of bad batches.