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Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026

307 points · 113 comments · HieronymusBosch

  1. Gigachad · · focus · HN ↗
    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.

    1. eyegor · · focus · HN ↗
      Spinning rust is still the only cost effective answer to redundant 10+ tb storage. If you have 4+ disks, use raid 6 or raid 10 and you get decent fault tolerance too. Raid 10 also increases write performance but it's a bit less robust imo and more expensive per gb.

      As for speed it's mainly tied to rpm and the market decided no one wants higher failure rates / lower mtbf for marginal speed gains.

      If you need speed and capacity, throw an ssd or two in front of a raid disk array for caching with primocache or whatever.

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