14 comments

  • sega_sai2 days ago
    It would be nice if it was just a conventional graph...
  • amelius2 days ago
    Why doesn't it show a pile of failed drives?
    • toss12 days ago
      YES

      And I'd want to see failed drives somehow organized by TimeInService and maybe origin...

      We of course expect their drive usage to grow, but what would be surprising (& provide more info) is how the drives fail or age-out. None of us without huge data centers can get that kind of info

      • bobbob19212 days ago
        Exactly, I’m. I was hoping to see all time drive failure data as well.
    • bddicken2 days ago
      I'd like to do another vis that includes failed drives. Please, keep helping me brainstorm.
    • FlyingAvatar2 days ago
      Yeah, I think it would be a cooler visualization if the drives were in a line instead of a circle and new drives are added on to the right. The failed drives pile up on the bottom.

      Still fun to watch as it is, though.

  • atYevP2 days ago
    Yev from Backblaze here -> Y'all this is one of our favorite things and I've spread it internally. So cool <3
    • bddicken2 days ago
      OP here - thank you! I'd actually like to more in the future with your data sets. It's so cool that you publish this.
      • atYevP2 days ago
        Love that! I think I re-shared your tweet about it a few days ago! I've been kinda staring at it on a loop on my monitor, fun to watch the balls bouncing around :D
  • RedShift12 days ago
    What exactly is this visualizing? Does each dot represent a chunk of data?
    • halper2 days ago
      1 small node is a 100 drives. So the small circles represent 100 drives each, I think. Not sure what they … do, though.
      • RedShift12 days ago
        Maybe the amount of drives they purchased?
        • florbo2 days ago
          I'm assuming it's the acquisition and removal of drives over time.
    • Piraty2 days ago
      > 1 small node -> 100 drives
  • NKosmatos2 days ago
    Nice one, we can see the (logical) shift to bigger drives. One small comment if I may, after 2020-2021 it gets really crowded with the dots and the number of drives leading to a loss of overall picture ;-)
    • bddicken2 days ago
      Thats good feedback. It definitely gets crowded, and sluggish due to the number of dom nodes. I didn't spend much time optimizing performance.
  • joshka2 days ago
    there's a few places where all the dots seem to drop (guessing there's some discontinuities in the data?)

    There's also a few places where there's duplicate labels (e.g. Hitachi 3TB)

    Would be great to group by manufacturer somehow (e.g. color) and make the size more prominent.

    Very cool visualization regardless.

    • Damogran62 days ago
      I took that to be massive decomming of drives
      • 2 days ago
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      • bddicken2 days ago
        Yeah, when drives fall off the bottom that represents decommissioning.
        • joshka2 days ago
          No, it's an obvious data error. The same drives reappear in future months.

          Pause and look at 2013-08-01 through 2013-11-01, or 2015-09-01 through 2016-01-01 to confirm this.

  • sebmellen2 days ago
    Doesn’t appear to work on mobile safari
    • jrimbault2 days ago
      Or firefox and chromium ubuntu desktop
      • alwyn2 days ago
        Works fine for me on Firefox Linux. Interestingly took a lot longer to load in Chromium and Brave but they all work.
      • patchtopic2 days ago
        or Chrome, Brave on Linux ?
        • Tijdreiziger2 days ago
          Doesn't appear to work in Firefox or Chrome on Android either.
          • fluidcruft2 days ago
            Works fine for me in Firefox Android.
            • kiwijamo1 day ago
              Ditto worked fine and was quite quick to load.
    • mvanbaak2 days ago
      It does, it just takes some time to download all the data
    • codecraze2 days ago
      It works on my iphone with safari
  • vladde2 days ago
    The data takes a while to load – a dozen megabytes of data or so. After a while the visualization loaded.

    (It loaded about 0.3MB/s for me)

  • BadJo0Jo02 days ago
    Fun to look at! Since I also had a mini project, that utilized this data. Sadly, haven't maintained it in awhile. It's a Show HN on my profile if you're curious.

    I hope you had a better time with ingesting the data than I did :)

    • bddicken2 days ago
      I actually built this primarily with chatGPT o1.

      One of the things LLMS are really good at is writing scripts for processing and pairing down data. I wanna do a blog post talking about how did some of this, maybe coming up!

  • fencepost2 days ago
    Probably wouldn't be that difficult to organize down the y axis based on drive capacity, and the amount of pointless jostling around of small nodes makes it noticeably bog down as the years go by.

    Interesting visualization though.

  • pcurve2 days ago
    As a data guy, I'm not sure how useful this chart is.

    But it sure is fun to look at. I enjoyed it ;-)

    Not sure why it would intermittently redraw the whole scene though.. could be a Chrome thing.

    • pmontra2 days ago
      It's empty in Firefox Android. Play button, slider and nothing else.
      • bddicken2 days ago
        [OP] Interesting! I just tested it on Android/FF and it works. Could be a version-specific thing. Could also be just taking awhile to load (it has to download a 32MB json file).
        • pmontra2 days ago
          Thanks. I waited and the animation finally started. Too bad that the browser has no feedback for unfinished loading like this one.

          And I didn't understand what all those dots falling down from above mean, but that's another story. If they wanted to show how many drives there are if each model they could have made the circles larger.

      • mlry2 days ago
        I had to allow d3.js in NoScript for Fennec. Had the same intermittant redraw of the entire screen mentioned above.
  • nrh2 days ago
    needs the ball sizes to represent the storage capacity!
    • pinoy4202 days ago
      That’s not true. Don’t shame me like that
    • bddicken2 days ago
      Great suggestion.
  • xbmcuser2 days ago
    I personally thought that ssd density and cost sizes would have crossed hdd prices by now. And we would start seeing them in these stats from blackblaze but hdd manufacturers seem to have stayed ahead of them so far.
    • datadrivenangel2 days ago
      Density wins but not cost. Maybe in another 5-10 years we'll get to parity.
      • Dylan168072 days ago
        A pile of microsd cards has been more dense than a hard drive for 20 years, basically as soon as the format existed and stabilized. But at that point you were paying 100x as much.

        I hope we reach parity. Right now prices have gone up since 2023, and flash is about 3x as expensive as hard drives.

  • 5 days ago
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