That said, all it would take is for the wrong leadership to start cutting corners to undo all of this hard work.

The Backblaze stock has taken a beating over the years. Recently I saw some news that there were issues with financial reporting (and fraud?). So it’s anybody’s guess as to what may happen or if the company would even be around (as it exists now) in the next decade.

I’d guess they may already have tools in place to prepare the stats and charts, leaving some amount of writing as manual work (which could or would probably be offloaded to generative AI). But analyzing the reliability of drives and publishing the data could also be seen as a competitive advantage when comparing with newer companies (positive and negative).

(As an anecdotal example -- I first heard about Backblaze from these reports many years ago and have relied on them to an extent in selecting new drives. I'm now a Backblaze customer.)

Hopefully not, given the performance one was just newly added!

These are HDDs.

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).

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).

Every drive failure will lead to an unhappy customer and product return, so you really want the failure rate in the first 10 years of operation to be 1% or below. (Which none of the drives in this study can do).