backblaze is a bunch of retards when it comes to data presentation
they release their data in such a mess of incomparable results that it's worthless as is
they talk about failure rates but they're comparing across different age drives which you just can't do
i mean saying these drives only have a 1% failure rate but we've only had them 6 months, is that better or worse that a drive that has a 10% failure rate after 5 years? No one knows
what they need to do is very simple:
a chart of cumulative failure rate by age
what % died by 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, etc
some drives will only have 6 months of data as they are new, some will go all the way through 5 years, that's fine, but at least the numbers at those points that they do have in common will be directly comparable
I find their presentation to be just fine. I don't need to know a 5 year failure rate vs. any other brand if the 1st year rate is 20%; I am not buying that drive. I don't think the BackBlaze data intends to tell you how Drive A compares to Drive B but it is incredibly useful in identifying drives at the extremes of the bell curve; i.e. HGST as a brand seems to be in a league of their own for reliability and you'd have to be an idiot to trust a 1.5TB or 3TB Seagate.
If I was paying them for research then I might feel justified in complaining about their data presentation but to get this much info about some broad reliability scores across this many consumer grade HDDs, and to get it for free,
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