Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

backblaze.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 116 posts

Re: Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

#31

Post by pfarnsworth »

andy4blaze wrote: post #26
pfarnsworth wrote: post #17

With hard drive size increasing so quickly but hard drive transfer speeds basically flat, I wonder if there are long-term implications for them with respect to recovery from backup and downtime. For example, if a whole rack goes down, and they are on 32TB drives in the future, for example, could it takes a week or more for their data to get online?

The Backblaze Vault design mitigates that as the "raid array" is scattered across 20 different Storage Pods in twenty different racks. You'd need more than three racks to go down before you would be offline. Backup systems in place make that highly unlikely. Andy at Backblaze.

I guess my question is more about the long term implications of transfer speeds increasing much slower than hard drives space. And if there's a hidden risk to downtime because all of a sudden, a full rack of 32 or even 64TB drive will take day(s) to transfer as opposed to an hour or so because transfer speeds are so slow.

Re: Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

#32

Post by atYevP »

MrMullen wrote: post #30
andy4blaze wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website is fine, Backup service is fine. Blog is overloaded and we're working on it.

You should really consider moving this webpage and report to something like AWS S3 when you first release it. Then move back to your usual servers when traffic has fallen off. Your poor servers must melt down when this shows up on Hacker News and Slashdot.

Internally we're blaming our SEO people for putting to much crap on the blog itself ;) But yea, it's worth exploring - though we have our own servers that should be able to handle the load. We haven't had blog loading trouble in a while, so it'll be neat to debug this later :D

Re: Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

#33

Post by 5ilv3r »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #13
mixedCase wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CrashPlan offers a Linux desktop client, and I believe they're a smaller player than Backblaze.

CrashPlan made a different decision. If I was to offer an unlimited backup service, I would offer it to novice users, not a small minority of power users and professionals who were going to break the business model with TBs of data. Let's be honest: when people see unlimited, most think "I don't have to worry about how much I'm storing" but a small group thinks "How can I take advantage of this?" Not supporting a Lin…

> Not supporting hackers fixes that quickly.

Fixed that for you. We're just trying to maximize our resources and minimize cost. Nothing wrong with that.

Re: Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

#34

Post by atom_enger »

MrMullen wrote: post #30
andy4blaze wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website is fine, Backup service is fine. Blog is overloaded and we're working on it.

You should really consider moving this webpage and report to something like AWS S3 when you first release it. Then move back to your usual servers when traffic has fallen off. Your poor servers must melt down when this shows up on Hacker News and Slashdot.

I'd suggest switching to a static site in general. I have no idea what kind of traffic they're sustaining at the moment but NGINX serving up static html (or s3) is a lot more efficient than Wordpress or another blog engine consuming cpu cycles.

Re: Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

#35

Post by ars »

leejoramo wrote: post #8

How are people using Backblaze's excellent hard drive reliability reports in making purchasing decisions? For example when I search for HGST HMS5C4040ALE640 on Amazon I get a dealer selling old out of warrantee drives as new. https://www.amazon.com/HGST-MegaScale-HMS5C4040ALE640-Coolsp... I get similar results with many of the other drives listed and with other websites such as NewEgg.

I did, I picked HGST because of their reports. No problems so far.

When you buy hard disks ONLY buy from Amazon or Newegg directly - never buy from a 3rd party seller on their site. Especially for hard disks there is too much fraud, and for a hard disk especially the risk of data loss makes it just too risky (unlike other items).

Re: Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

#36

Post by theandrewbailey »

atom_enger wrote: post #34
MrMullen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should really consider moving this webpage and report to something like AWS S3 when you first release it. Then move back to your usual servers when traffic has fallen off. Your poor servers must melt down when this shows up on Hacker News and Slashdot.

I'd suggest switching to a static site in general. I have no idea what kind of traffic they're sustaining at the moment but NGINX serving up static html (or s3) is a lot more efficient than Wordpress or another blog engine consuming cpu cycles.

At the very least, use a reverse proxy with lots of caching.

Re: Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

#37

Post by discreditable »

ars wrote: post #35
leejoramo wrote: post #8

How are people using Backblaze's excellent hard drive reliability reports in making purchasing decisions? For example when I search for HGST HMS5C4040ALE640 on Amazon I get a dealer selling old out of warrantee drives as new. https://www.amazon.com/HGST-MegaScale-HMS5C4040ALE640-Coolsp... I get similar results with many of the other drives listed and with other websites such as NewEgg.

I did, I picked HGST because of their reports. No problems so far. When you buy hard disks ONLY buy from Amazon or Newegg directly - never buy from a 3rd party seller on their site. Especially for hard disks there is too much fraud, and for a hard disk especially the risk of data loss makes it just too risky (unlike other items).

> When you buy hard disks ONLY buy from Amazon or Newegg directly - never buy from a 3rd party seller on their site.

Agreed. A few times I've purchased third-party disks and found (via SMART data) that the drives were well used despite not being sold as such.

Re: Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

#38

Post by [deleted] »

ars wrote: post #35
leejoramo wrote: post #8

How are people using Backblaze's excellent hard drive reliability reports in making purchasing decisions? For example when I search for HGST HMS5C4040ALE640 on Amazon I get a dealer selling old out of warrantee drives as new. https://www.amazon.com/HGST-MegaScale-HMS5C4040ALE640-Coolsp... I get similar results with many of the other drives listed and with other websites such as NewEgg.

I did, I picked HGST because of their reports. No problems so far. When you buy hard disks ONLY buy from Amazon or Newegg directly - never buy from a 3rd party seller on their site. Especially for hard disks there is too much fraud, and for a hard disk especially the risk of data loss makes it just too risky (unlike other items).

[deleted]

Re: Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

#39

Post by devonkim »

porker wrote: post #6

Anyone have a reason why the WD30EFRX has such poor reliability in their last table? Granted it's a smaller sample size. Only asking 'cause it's my main data hard drive...

IIRC 3TB drives were among the newer drives commercially available at retail when the flooding happened in Thailand and all retail drives were impacted negatively. Furthermore, aggregate capacity is only one factor in the design of a hard drive and most 3TB drives were made in a manner that reduces reliability (more platters of same capacity or fewer platters with greater individual platter capacity, can't quite remember which unfortunately). I don't see why a manufacturer would put the newest technology into product lines that are older so I'd presume that 3TB drives are among the greatest in number of platters and the extra components contributes to the failure rate.

Among the least reliable drives I saw in previous reports were Seagate 3TB drives (supposedly they had worse reliability than the legendary IBM Deathstars) and after reading about how 3TB drives were designed across manufacturers years ago during the flooding crisis I decided to avoid 3TB drives entirely. Seems like my decision is finally getting some data to back it up now in hindsight (no pun intended).

Re: Backblaze hard drive reliability stats for Q3 2016

#40

Post by dom0 »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #17

With hard drive size increasing so quickly but hard drive transfer speeds basically flat, I wonder if there are long-term implications for them with respect to recovery from backup and downtime. For example, if a whole rack goes down, and they are on 32TB drives in the future, for example, could it takes a week or more for their data to get online?

Well, uh, yes.

No one really expects that rotational rust will get much faster, and in fact history shows that, compared to the increase in density, the increase in transfer rates are laughable at best. Between 1990 and today you are probably looking at a 20 000 times increase in density, yet transfer rates only increased around a factor of around 150-200. [In fact, from the early 1960 to today it's only a factor of about 1000. There are quite possibly few performance metrics that increased so slowly as disk transfer rate].

Why is that?

Increasing density does only marginally increase transfer speed: Most density increases are achieved by packing more tracks onto the platter, while storing more sectors per track plays a minor role. But a single R/W head can only read a single track, not parallel tracks, hence speed only increases if you pack more sectors into each track, not by increasing the number of tracks. That's why between today and 10 years ago performance in desktop or server drives only differs a little, compared to the capacity increase to 8+ TB in a 3.5" drive.

More platters also don't help in transfer rate, because the alignment of all heads on the actuator is fixed: at any given time only one platter and one R/W head is used (locked to the track). [More platters can help reduce seek time in certain scenarios though]

More disks on the other hand...

Post reply on HN