Backblaze Hard Drive Lifetime Annualized 2013-2023(backblaze.com) |
Backblaze Hard Drive Lifetime Annualized 2013-2023(backblaze.com) |
That being said, truly bad series of HDDs have been extremely uncommon in the past decade. Of course, everyone is on NVMe Flash now for storage that actually matters, but I think the last epic "enterprise scale" nearline-class mess-up were the Seagate Barracude 1(.5)TB drives, introduced in 2013 and last sold in 2016?
Anyway, I've been very happy recently with some huge arrays running 14/15/18TB Western Digital SAS drives. The only (but pretty foreseeable) issue is that RAID6 arrays, once a drive in the set goes bad, simply can't be rebuilt in an acceptable timeframe.
So, standard procedure now is to have one empty RAID6-backed volume on standby at all times, so data can be migrated there from a degraded volume, after which the latter (after drive replacement) can be rebuilt from scratch.
Not an approach that would work at huge scale, but for simple-old-me, it's sufficient...