What a terrible article.
“We had one drive failure… Everyone take out the pitchforks!”
Yeah no. Drive failures happen. Period. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2023/
I understand that there was a firmware failure in the 4TB drives… but come on, there’s no journalistic integrity here to even CHECK what firmware the device was on? Nothing at all here substantial.
Further, you should be practicing 3-2-1 backups if the data is that important. It shouldn’t matter to you that one storage failed.
Yeah, I’m kind of torn on this one. On one hand, having a drive replaced for an issue, then having that replacement fail with the same issue (or at least same effect) reeks of problems. That probably warrants merit.
On the other hand, it does show they likely have poor data backup practices if losing a single hard drive is costing them 3TB data loss. Either they were recording a day’s worth of video and lost it, in which case that sucks but it happens, or they had a ton of other data that likely should have already been backed up elsewhere in which case I have little sympathy.
that replacement fail with the same issue
They said on the 4TB that singular files were being dropped/lost (likely hitting some magical number of files and oldest one falls out of controller memory or something stupid like that). This new one has the entire drive inaccessible completely. The 4TB makes sense as a firmware issue that was patched. The 3TB one sounds more like a controller failure IMO… I would call these different modes of failure. But there’s not a single shred of evidence that they’ve even looked at any of that. That’s my problem. There’s no journalistic work here except “see drive dead”. And if the 3TB failure is as I described… then it’s literally a “it happens”.
