GoKawiil
Tech News
A technical walkthrough details four common RAID configurations—RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 10—that users can set up with spare hard drives. It explains how each configuration balances speed, storage capacity and data redundancy differently, from striping for performance to mirroring for safety.
Backblaze's latest Drive Stats report covers Q2 2026, analyzing annualized failure rates for 354,415 hard drives after excluding 3,881 boot drives and 705 hard drives that didn't meet inclusion criteria. The report highlights standout drive models, lifetime fleet failure data, and comparisons between traditional CMR hard drives and newer higher-capacity drive technologies at 20TB and above. Backblaze also announced a webinar on October 8 to discuss the findings with its market intelligence and product marketing teams.
Solid-state drives now come in two main interface types: SATA, which tops out near 600 MB/s in theory and 500-560 MB/s in real-world use, and NVMe, which runs over PCIe and can hit roughly 3,500 MB/s on older Gen3 drives up to nearly 15,000 MB/s on newer Gen5 models. Both technologies store data on flash memory and vastly outperform mechanical hard drives, but they differ sharply in how they connect to and communicate with a computer.
A storage guide outlines how heat, humidity, and magnetic fields can damage hard drives over time, and notes that even undisturbed drives can fail due to seized mechanical parts or degraded capacitors. It recommends backing up all important data before archiving a drive, verifying the transfer, and following the 3-2-1 backup rule: three copies of data on two different mediums with one stored offsite.