Tracking 300,000+ Drives: What We’ve Learned After 13 Years

Backblaze, Inc. announced that Pat Patterson, chief technical evangelist, and Stephanie Doyle, writer and content strategist, will be speaking at DefCon 33, presenting a talk called, Tracking 300k+ Drives: What We’ve Learned After 13 Years.

Backblaze manages over 4EBs of data stored on over 300,000 HDDs in data centers across the world. This session, the Backblaze Drive Stats Team will cover how we collect and share the Drive Stats dataset and reports, including how we recently improved data processing and failure validations with Iceberg, Snowflake, and Trino, and a live demo of the same. The session will also touch on updated AFR trends by drive model and size, SSD tracking challenges, and share how drive insights have contributed to performance improvements in data centers.

“Drive Stats is a content franchise that has built an incredible community of technical leaders who are passionate about storage and use,” said Patrick Thomas, VP of Marketing, Backblaze. “Sharing our primary source data and our process with the DefCon community is an incredible opportunity to spark new ideas and experiments, while supporting the HDD manufacturers who quietly power the protection and use of data across the planet.“

DefCon 2025 is being held August 7-10 at the Las Vegas Convention Center West Hall. The session is being presented twice at the Data Duplication Village located in LVCC-L2-W225 on August 8, at 1:00 p.m., and August 9, at 1:00 p.m.

For more information, visit: https://dcddv.org/dc-33-talks-schedule.