If you were Seagate would you admit that you were even shipping refurb drives?

A question if I may - what are the experiences of BackBlaze when it comes to so called "bit rot"? You guys have enough drives in operation that this is a potential issue and I'm curious as to experience and countermeasures if any. With the rise of ZFS and BTRFS etc. this has been something that has caught my eye but I'm not yet sure it's something I'm inclined to worry about so i'm curious as to unbiased experiences. i know there has been an article or two in the past about how BackBlaze works but I don't recall these kinds of low level details being in it. Can you share?

Ah now THIS is helpful and I wish I'd seen it sooner. If it's only taking 15 minutes of time to swap a drive then THAT skews things a good bit! The report seemed to make it sound like swapping a drive was a bigger deal and that some pods required some handholding in order to become functional. What about drives that "pop out" - no big deal?

Yes, in the article by BackBlaze actually. They find that warranty replacement drives drop like flies and they believe it's because the drives are refurbished.

"The Seagate Barracuda Green 1.5TB drive, though, has not been doing well. We got them from Seagate as warranty replacements for the older drives, and these new drives are dropping like flies. Their average age shows 0.8 years, but since these are warranty replacements, we believe that they are refurbished drives that were returned by other customers and erased, so they already had some usage when we got them."

Pretend they get a 50% discount on that $130 drive. Now pretend it fails and that it's replacement sucks too. It takes hours to rebuild the array, it takes time to replace the drive, and in some cases certain drives simply "pop out" of the array and require some hand feeding to return to service. Still think that whopping $50 or so was worth it? I'm thinking not so much...

Instead of focusing like a laser on brand you should perhaps be looking at models. While Seagate dominated for drive most likely to die apparently the 4TB drives are bucking the trend and thus far have been found worthy of purchase. Personally I found this to be pretty interesting and valuable information and far from an advertisement since they did pretty much nothing to push their service and simply provided interesting statistics - for free no less!

I'd start with ConsumerReports. Not everyone likes them but if you want that kind of data for say TVs and automobiles they claim to have it....

If you buy local from say a big box store you get the pleasure of a drive that's been drop kicked by punks stocking shelves and by twits shopping the store. I just received 5 drives from NewEgg shipped "bare". They came in sleeves of some sort of custom bubble packaging that held the drive snug and had a bubbled flap that capped off the open end. This in turn was placed inside of a cardboard box that tightly held the bubbled thingy and was then placed inside of a larger box and surrounded by their normal cardboard.

I can't say that this is them hearing everyone bitching or not but it was way better than the old bubble wrap, gum tape, and a prayer shipping they used to use about half the time - the other half they shipped in some very nice OEM type packagaing. Seemed a crap shoot but non eo fmy stuff shipped DOA and most of it is on it's 3rd year working...

A tip for you - stick the drive in a plastic baggie and then stick the bag into a glass of ice water with the open end for cables above water. Do this after first freezing the drive and you will be able to keep the drive colder longer and get more data before it warms up and start to have read failures. you could probably also stick it between a couple of frozen cold packs but condensation might be a concern

You might want to read their report as they point out that swapping drives is COSTLY. Their experience is that it's better to pay a little more and not have to screw with the drive. Their report also documents which drives "pop out" of their RAID arrays and require costly attention. When a RAID array goes "bad" it can take time to recover, that's a cost that is almost certainly going to be more than what that troublesome drive saved them in the short run. These drives don't cost much more than $100 apiece and I'm betting their employees aren't being paid minimum wage so that hypothetical $50 savings isn't much especially if data is lost....

Might want to check on that especially if you buy bare drives. I believe the warranty may be as short as a year and certainly not more than three. The days of five year warranties for drives appear to be long gone! thankfully at the pace my data grows and the drive capacities grow my drives seldom stay in use more than two years!

Tech tip - when you install a drive use a Sharpie to write down the date. I've been pretty surprised at how long some of my drives have turned out to be in use when I've decided to swap them as a result of doing this! This also helps you figure out if you have a snowball's chance in hell of making a warranty claim :-( The warranty often starts at date of manufacture and while I've usually been able to provide proof via NewEgg or Amazon of my purchase date I have little doubt they would screw you given a chance...

Not only that but I prefer to keep my data in MY control and not shoot it up someplace where someone might decide they want to peek at it! Apparently encryption these days offered by vendors is something that can be counted on to be compromised if someone decides to serve them papers. I'll keep my stuff mine thanks...

Actually if you look they do call out model numbers and even talk about which ones they won't touch and I find this VERY interesting and informative! As it happens my 30TB of space happens to contain a mix of both "reliable" and "unreliable" drives according to their testing. I run a mix of sizes from 1.5TB to 3TB using unRAID and as drives fill up they get upgraded. I have a few 1.5s that they call out as being trash (ST31500341AS) and an EARS drive of that size that should probably go ASAP since they are well into their second if not third year of use. I actually happen to be running a parity check right now and once I got past the 1.5 drives speeds increased a great deal. Once past the 2TB models things got even better so the 3TB drives appear to be much better performers. Naturally they list the ST3000DM001 as having a 10% failure rate too so I'm not exactly doing handstands! The replacement drives are all that model and I've been playing with them in another system to try and come up with something better for my needs than unRAID and so far nothing has come out much better so into the array I guess they will go here shortly.

My hat's off to Backblaze for publishing this and letting consumers know who's got decent drives and putting feet to the fire those that don't!

And I may have spoken too soon, I think I see a Linux TeamViewer too! Okay, sorry LogMeIn but this just sealed the deal - I can manage my home desktop and the VMs on my ESX server all from one product. I no longer have top bring up Vsphere to get to my Linux VMs, way way better. Why LogMeIn never created a Linux client is beyond me but they sure just lost a bunch of folks by making them look elsewhere!

I just switched to TeamViewer, thankfully they too have an IOS application and are almost as easy to use as LogMeIn was - time will tell just how well it works when I'm on travel and want to access my home machines. I have in the past turned MANY people on to LogMeIn so that they may help out family members who's computers need occasional maintenance and who aren't local, at least one or two of them recommended the product to their companies for remote access on a paying basis. That will obviously no longer be the case moving forward and I think that this is a huge mistake by LogMeIn. They obviously believe that many people are using their service so heavily they cannot switch - surprise that's NOT the case as I just easily switched. I still like the product LogMeIn provided but this really felt like a betrayal and with the short notice I'm having to scramble a bit and i'm sure many others are even worse off. Why would I trust this company in the future after this? what's to stop them from taking my money and then deciding to bump prices like my cable company? No thanks, plenty of other solutions and I'm happy that this time I'm not rolling my own because sure as heck there's no way to try and get friend's who support their parents to do that. I tried using UltraVNC once upon a time for this and it was a disaster! At least Ultra is cross platform but right now I carry an IOS device and I've found no good client for that.