I'm surprised Backblaze doesn't use host-managed SMR. I would expect that they'd already write data sequentially for speed and have different storage tiers (for "hot" data likely to be changed/deleted soon vs. data expected to stay for a long time). At least for large files in the cold tier SMR would make a lot of sense.

I bought two WD Red 6TB drives for a NAS, and both failed within two years. That’s unusually bad in my experience. Across two other NAS systems I’ve used for 15–20 years, I’ve only replaced drives three times.

One failed drive was replaced with the same model, which doesn’t inspire much confidence. The other couldn’t be replaced, so I received a refund of the original €198 purchase price from 1.5 years ago. The exact same 6TB drive now costs around €340, a pretty steep increase. For the second drive I went with Seagate, fingers crossed.

Tables with headers that scroll differently from their body is a horror I had not imagined until I clicked this link

With more old drives in the fleet it would be interesting to see a followup chart from the bathtub curve post https://www.backblaze.com/blog/drive-failure-over-time-the-b...

Something that's interested me is how hard drive capacities have continuously gone up, but read and write speeds have not really changed. To the point where it would take multiple days to read these new high capacity drives.

I wonder what the use case for them is, they aren't ideal for RAID as they would take far too long to rebuild the array in a drive failure, but they also aren't great for long term cold storage. Perhaps they are ideal for periodic backups where you want to take a daily 1TB backup of a server or CCTV where you don't really care about backing up the data as it's all deleted on schedule anyway.

Seagate: It was the best of drives, it was the worst of drives…

*AFR%-wise

Since Backblaze publishes the stats, Seagate somehow doesn’t dare to put awfully bad drives on the market - ehm they did have a baaad track record. At least the ones monitored by BB seem to be performing well.

Hah. "load bearing" is such a common claude-ism that its legitimate usage now needs to be acknowledged:

"That question is becoming more relevant as higher-capacity drives become more (dare we say) load bearing."

thx for posting this. Personally I am a fan of Western Digital Black Label spinning drives. Say what you will! I have details, and basically they work for me. AFAIK in 2026 and back into 2025, there are very large, new high-spec Western Digital Black Label disks in the catalog.. that I just cannot order. It says "all orders are pre-allocated until further notice" or similar ? Meanwhile, the same disks I bought ten years ago, same size, spec, performance and rating, as also available and I can buy those.. for perhaps twenty percent more than I paid long ago. This is new to me, this situation where an ordinary civilian cannot purchase the large drives, exclusive to "select customers" with opaque wording and no end in sight. The happy escalator of increasing spec and similar consumer prices, has ended.

Why am I reading the very newest Backblaze drive report -- they fired the over-forty engineer who started this, apparently.. and I as a consumer, cannot buy the same drives that might be listed there -- have not looked yet. The entire situation is fundementally changed. Info welcome