Hard Drive Reliability At Backblaze

This article
<https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/03/backblaze_drive_reliability_stats/>
on the latest disk reliability report from backup business Backblaze
led me to following up some interesting links. In this older item
<https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk_reliability/>,
they were criticized for making misleading claims about consumer-grade
drives being more reliable than enterprise-grade ones. But I do think
it is clear that the difference between them is not worth the cost.

One important point I got from the latter is “replacing one drive takes
about 15 minutes of work”. That quote ends with “Moral of the story:
design for failure and buy the cheapest components you can”. Which
seems the logical thing to do anyway. That sentence is followed by a
smiley, but as far as I’m concerned, who needs the smiley?

I also like this article
<https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-smart-stats/> from their
blog, where they go into which SMART statistics are worth looking at.
The one that stands out is counter 187, uncorrectable read errors. If
that goes above zero, then the disk is bad and should be replaced.
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