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Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

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Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#151

Post by tinus_hn »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #95
zeroname wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ten people give their opinions, as requested. One person thinks you're arrogant and tells you so. You can't argue with results.

What's the old line? If you have a problem with your Linux system, don't post asking how to fix it because you'll get nothing; post saying how Linux sucks because this thing doesn't work and you'll get a dozen replies in an hour. Sometimes, personality dynamics cause certain approaches to work better than one might prefer. :)

It’s the JWZ Lazyweb

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#152

Post by linsomniac »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #102
linsomniac wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As others have mentioned, vibration can be a problem in these environments. But heat is also something you want to deal with. Clean power is also something to be concerned with.

In the past I've used a lot of those Supermicro 5x3" drive carriers and they have really good airflow. This was for storage in servers I built for home use. I wrote up something in 2008 about one I built here: www.tummy.com/articles/ultimatestorage2008/

Faster spinning disks generate more heat and vibrations than slower spinning ones. 15K drives are notorious for needing good environmentals.

My current storage needs are pretty limited, which probably would make SSD attractive. Or we are getting there at least. My storage server right now has 6TB used, and around 1TB of that is backups. If I could get by with 4x 2TB SSDs, I might consider it, just for longevity sake. I'm using ZFS BTW.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#153

Post by VectorLock »

simcop2387 wrote: post #84
VectorLock wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me curious of where the cost/benefit point is between these brands of drives. Do they buy enough that the reduced cost for higher failure rate outweighs the expense of buying more expensive drives?

They buy enough drives that there's another point of data that's needed for them. Availability of the disks. If they need to expand a few 10s of petabytes they may only be able to get enough disks from one group regardless of reliability concerns.

Thats what surprised me when I learned that they were "shucking" drives from off the shelf external drives at some point.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#154

Post by atYevP »

icelancer wrote: post #91

My company uses Backblaze since I think it's a good product, but blogs like this really cemented my choice. I appreciate their attention to detail and publishing data openly.

Yev from Backblaze here -> That's awesome to hear! I'm glad you're with us! That's one of the nice side-benefits of this blog and one of the reasons we adopted an "open" policy with the Storage Pods. The first time we published that post it was because folks didn't believe we could store data so inexpensively - so it's nice to hear that we're building some trust along the way!

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#155

Post by nathanlv »

linsomniac wrote: post #152
HillaryBriss wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As others have mentioned, vibration can be a problem in these environments. But heat is also something you want to deal with. Clean power is also something to be concerned with. In the past I've used a lot of those Supermicro 5x3" drive carriers and they have really good airflow. This was for storage in servers I built for home use. I wrote up something in 2008 about one I built here: www.tummy.com/articles/ultimates…

Yes. I used to see equipment -- hard drives, video cards, motherboards -- burn out at least once a year, and then I installed a power conditioner on my hardware. That was 4 years ago. Last year, for the first time in 17 years, I upgraded my motherboard by choice rather than replacing it after a failure.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#156

Post by nathanlv »

metalliqaz wrote: post #66
linsomniac wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my head it wasn't negative, it was that there are a lot of reasons that I don't think needed to be gone into. Offering value is one, having systems that are designed to minimize the impact of failures is another. Others that came to mind when I wrote that include: Being able to get them at the quantities they need, having systems that reduce the COST of failures (drive replacement and RMA), cost of RMAing 10 drive…

hmmm, I always thought "because reasons" was sarcastic, as in the person would list reasons but they are all bullshit. Of course, sarcasm can be impossible to discern correctly on Internet forums and social media. I admit I could be completely wrong about this.

Sarcasm tends to depend on context, tone, and delivery. It is particularly difficult to interpret in written commentary such as blogs like this.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#157

Post by flyinghamster »

linsomniac wrote: post #152
HillaryBriss wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As others have mentioned, vibration can be a problem in these environments. But heat is also something you want to deal with. Clean power is also something to be concerned with. In the past I've used a lot of those Supermicro 5x3" drive carriers and they have really good airflow. This was for storage in servers I built for home use. I wrote up something in 2008 about one I built here: www.tummy.com/articles/ultimates…

I built up a homebrew NAS with three of those Supermicro drive bays, and, other than the need to remove/replace screws (and not lose them for empty bays), I've really liked them.

However, I can't for the life of me find out whether or not those bays will work with 6 Gb/s SATA. I've been considering putting my Ryzen 7 board into the NAS case to consolidate two systems into one, but I'm not going to go to that effort if I have to get new hotswap bays.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#158

Post by atYevP »

boulos wrote: post #146
brianwski wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Thanks for mentioning this! I’ve always (begrudgingly) had to tell people that while I love Backblaze you have to understand the geographic risk. I always suspected you had a “yeah, we can put you here if we edit this config file” but the drop down will be much better for everyone. Looking forward to it!

Yev from Backblaze here -> We look forward to you hosting GCS in B2 :P Seriously though - it IS something we've done if a customer had legitimate concerns but having it be more streamlined will be a much cleaner process!

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#160

Post by humantiy »

tzs wrote: post #122
humantiy wrote: post #56

Curious if anyone knows how they calculate drive days. For example the first drive on their report (hgst 4tb) has a count of 50 but total days of 23069. If I take the 50 by the days it should be 18250, so not sure where the extra 4k in days is coming from. Retired drives or something?

I think it is over the time they have had the drive, not over the reporting interval. It's a measure of the age of the drives. Assuming their drives are operating 24/7, that means that those particular 50 drives have been in service an average of 461 days. I'd expect on next year's report, those particular drives will show up as 49 drives with around 42000 drive days, assuming they aren't replaced by then.

If that is the case then wouldn't the Annualized Failure Rate be based of the year total not the drive days if it is total days in service? For example the drive count(50)/drive days(23,236) gives the AFR of 1.58% which equals out their numbers. The drive days is more than the total amount possible for that year.
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