131–140 of 165 posts
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Especially if you're an individual person with a non-raid6 / hot spare system, you might pay a premium for a lower failure rate (standalone drive, RAID1, or RAID5, for example).
Although in the year 2019 it would be pretty reckless to use RAID5 without hotspare. Or even RAID5 with hotspare. This has been true for a long, long time: https://www.google.com/search?&q=why+raid5+stops+working&ie=...
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Thank you! To summarize I understand: A) the local working copy (locally replicated in your case), B) the local backup and C) the cloud/very remote backup. B & C cover each other if any datacenter is completely wiped out.
Correct. > if any datacenter is completely wiped out Correct. When all of our datacenters were in Sacramento, California, some customers told us they were concerned because they were ALSO in Sacramento and a meteor could wipe out both their computer, the local backup, and Backblaze's cloud backup, all in one meteor strike. While by default we put your data where it is convenient for Backblaze, we CAN work with custom…
Interesting about the new European region, for sure at least from the point of view of "locality" (I assume that from the point of view of "data ownership" the US will still consider itself "owner" of the data as the holding/legal entity (don't know what kind of company it is, but your website mentions San Mateo US) has its headquarters in the US.
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My experience, over decades, but now coming up on half that ago, was that IBM/Hitachi/HGST are definitely worth it. I used to run a small hosting business, which had hundreds of discs, and consulting business which had clients with hundreds more discs. Seagates, in general, could always be expected to fail in a 3 year span. Often multiple times. IBM/Hitachi/HGST, especially the UltraStar enterprise line, would basica…
> improper cooling You've had far more experience with this stuff than I have. I wonder what your view is on all these NAS RAID boxes and HDD longevity and heat. I personally never saw so many HDD failures until I started running them inside a small NAS I bought some years ago. I nicknamed it my "drive killer" because I was replacing the things so often. Other HDDs I have in other (non-NAS) machines sure seemed to la…
If you see this repeatedly with one machine, I would definitely consider that it is the machine which is bad rather than the drives. A power supply may be insufficient to support the peak requirements of the drives, for example. A poor mounting structure might resonate or transfer vibration or shock into one or more drive slots from the environment.
I really appreciate BackBlaze opening up this data. While I don't purchase HDDs often, I always refer to these reports when deciding. They also open sourced their server chassis which is awesome! It's nice to see a reduction of the failure rates as a whole. It looks like the next few years will be some interesting times for the growth in storage capacities for HDDs.
Yev from Backblaze here -> Glad you're enjoying the stats!
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>>So when a drive is HALF-FAILED, we even have a procedure to pull the drive out, and then opportunistically copy whatever files we can recover onto a new drive, then put the new drive back into production. Do I understand correctly, that when the drive is half-failed, you don't just say "it will probably completely stop working in the near future" and discard/replace it but keep using it?
If it was half failed we would DEFINITELY pull the drive out because it is already 1 drive down out of 20 for half the files. A lot of times the IT guys will make a judgement call that a drive is acting funny or slightly off so they just "fail it on purpose" which means yank it and replace with a new drive. We have done this just because a drive is "slow" (slow can mean the drive is having trouble writing data reliab…
You guys should think about writing a short eBook about e.g. general recommendations about setups/analysis/projections & stories about past failures/chain-of-events/etc - I might buy it :)
Tangentially related. Whenever I get a new drive, I always do a "burn-in". A program writes data to the whole drive and then reads it back (reproducible random data). Is there any real justification for doing this kind of test on a new drive? Doing it takes quite awhile, so I've been wondering lately if it's even worth it. I've never found anything with it.
If you've never found anything with it, why do you keep doing it (see: the definition of insanity)?
insanity | inˈsanədē |
noun
the state of being seriously mentally ill; madness
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> improper cooling You've had far more experience with this stuff than I have. I wonder what your view is on all these NAS RAID boxes and HDD longevity and heat. I personally never saw so many HDD failures until I started running them inside a small NAS I bought some years ago. I nicknamed it my "drive killer" because I was replacing the things so often. Other HDDs I have in other (non-NAS) machines sure seemed to la…
It's not impossible to have a drive appear unreliable in one machine and reliable in another (if you physically move it). There could be something electrically or mechanically wrong with the machine which causes a particular drive to malfunction more frequently. If you see this repeatedly with one machine, I would definitely consider that it is the machine which is bad rather than the drives. A power supply may be in…
Tangentially related. Whenever I get a new drive, I always do a "burn-in". A program writes data to the whole drive and then reads it back (reproducible random data). Is there any real justification for doing this kind of test on a new drive? Doing it takes quite awhile, so I've been wondering lately if it's even worth it. I've never found anything with it.
If you've never found anything with it, why do you keep doing it (see: the definition of insanity)?
Apparently, quality assurance should never be a thing.
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If you've never found anything with it, why do you keep doing it (see: the definition of insanity)?
insanity | inˈsanədē | noun the state of being seriously mentally ill; madness I'm not sure when the definition of obsessive-compulsive started being used to describe insanity (it's been going on for at least a decade), but I don't like it (and cringe every time I hear someone repeat it).
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If you've never found anything with it, why do you keep doing it (see: the definition of insanity)?
Not the parent, but probably because 1. It's notorious that hard drives have a higher failure rate at the beginning of their lives than in the middle (see bathtub curve [0]). So it's not absurd to test them hard early on before writing any useful data and to do an early RMA. 2. The failure rate on drives is low enough that his methodology may be right but he still never has any failure in his life. Doesn't it make in…
Next day the HDD didn’t turn on. Completely dead. :( I’ve never had a failure since but I backup everything now.