What is a "Drive Day"?
Looks kind of fishy when one drive is listed as 80 months old and has 323,000 "Drive Days", while another dive is much younger at 14 months old, but has 11,600,000 "Drive Days".
Cloud storage and backup provider Backblaze has released a comprehensive report detailing reliability statistics for the hard drives it operated during the whole of 2021, with an interesting finding on its older kit. The report leaves out boot drives (which are SSDs) and focuses on Backblaze's data drives, of which the firm …
Well, that's not a single drive... I think that's the total operating days clocked by all the drives of that model, and the age is the average age of that model.
So if you had 5 drives of model XYZ running for a month, that'd be 150 drive-days.
That would mean they have a shit-ton (or ass-load, depending) of the one with 11.6M drive days, and indeed, it's listed as 38K drives of that model.
Andy from Backblaze here: We collect SMART stats data at the current time on a daily basis, but none of those stats record data volume as best as I can tell, at least for hard drives. Some of the SMART stats for SSDs look like they could do that, or at least imply they could, but we'd have to dig into those numbers to see if 1) they are actually reported, and 2) they are what we think they are, and 3) how consistent they are across the myriad of SSD manufacturers, so I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Andy, thanks for info. However, whatever controllers inside each Tome and run by OS should have some device usage data surely . Just using SMART seems a trifle trusting. Just asking as my own past limited experience in big arrays allowed individual device data or at least virtual device stats were extractable, eventually.
Andy Klein here from Backblaze. The stats do not distinguish between pre and post acquisition, except by model number of the HGST drives starting with HMS (HGST), to HUH (shortly after the acquisition) to WUH (WD branded drives). When and how much influence WD has on the HGST team over time and vice-versa is unknown. But I will agree the recent WUH model drives are pretty HGST-esque in their reliability.
"Your questions show your ignorance"
Now that's perceptive! Duh, questions are indeed triggered by ignorance in some specific matter, aren't they?...
But, most importantly, they are fueled by the commendable desire to fix this ignorance. They are not meant as a means for the self-righteous bullies to signal their blinding superiority.
People asking a honest question, no matter how stupid it might sound to you, should be respected, there are plenty of domains you yourself are the stupid ignoramus to be made fun of.
(I'm not the OP BTW)
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Backblaze has published the first SSD edition of its regular drive statistics report, which appears to show that flash drives are as reliable as spinning disks, although with surprising failure rates for some models.
The cloud storage and backup provider publishes quarterly and annual Drive Stat reports, which focused exclusively on rotating hard drives until last year. Backblaze said it will initially publish the SSD edition twice a year, but that this may change depending on how valuable readers find it. The 2021 Drive Stats report was published in February.
In a blog post detailing the latest probing, Backblaze cloud storage evangelist Andy Klein said the SSDs are all used as boot drives in the firm's storage servers, and that Backblaze only began using SSDs this way from Q4 of 2018. He pointed out the drives do more than just boot the servers, they also store log files and temporary files produced by the servers, and so each SSD will read, write, and delete files depending on the activity of the server during the day.
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