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ST3000DM001

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Re: ST3000DM001

#41

Post by taylorfinley »

bigiain wrote: post #21
edward wrote: post #19

In 2012 I was working at the Internet Archive. I remember the 2011 Thailand floods restricted the supply of hard disks and pushed up prices. The best deal we could find was buying these Seagate hard disks as external drives at retail from Costco. We picked up a truck load. Then had somebody with a screw driver remove them all from the enclosures and install them in new servers. The error rate was high, the drives did…

Dropbox (or maybe BackBlaze?) called that "shucking".

I don't know if Backblaze's usage predates it becoming the common way to describe this practice, but it's definitely caught on. For example see any deal post on an external drive on reddit /r/datahoarder

Re: ST3000DM001

#42

Post by Lammy »

myrandomcomment wrote: post #24

Back in the mid 90s I was working in IT at a midsized company. We used Compaq desktops (this is the Pentium Pro timeframe). The HD in the system where quantum fireball (IIRC). They failed at an amazing rate all in the first 3 months (30%). We called Compaq at one point and said, look we want replacement drives for all of our remaining systems. After much back and forth (stupid on their part as we had 1000+ machines o…

Were they Fireball SE maybe? http://www.redhill.net.au/d/74.php

"In the case of the Fireball SE, the mounting of the [power] socket was so flimsy that it was all too easy to break the PCB and thus ruin the drive. (With most other drives, you would have to be a gorilla and a drunken one at that.)"

Re: ST3000DM001

#44

Post by grp000 »

myrandomcomment wrote: post #24

Back in the mid 90s I was working in IT at a midsized company. We used Compaq desktops (this is the Pentium Pro timeframe). The HD in the system where quantum fireball (IIRC). They failed at an amazing rate all in the first 3 months (30%). We called Compaq at one point and said, look we want replacement drives for all of our remaining systems. After much back and forth (stupid on their part as we had 1000+ machines o…

I'm not familiar with data center tools or terminology. What is a tazer in this context?

Re: ST3000DM001

#45

Post by r1ch »

geocrasher wrote: post #8
LeoPanthera wrote: post #4

I also remember the IBM Deskstar 75GXP, which was so unreliable it earned the nickname "Deathstar".

I worked at a small web hosting company back then, and we used a bunch of IBM Deathstar's. They certainly lived up to their name! I disassembled one just to see what went wrong, and I found the cause (of that drive's failure, at least). Here's a list of terms for reference: http://data-recovery-tips.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/h... At some point, the bearing that serves as the pivot that the actuator arm and act…

I have a recording from one of my drives which I believe was a failing Deathstar. Not a pleasant sound to experience.

https://r-1.ch/hdd.mp3 (warning, loud)

Re: ST3000DM001

#47

Post by toast0 »

beagle3 wrote: post #34
atkbrah wrote: post #18

At my previous employer we had a 24 disk zfs storage server built using these disks (thanks to an external consultant who replaced enterprise grade disks because "they're basically the same"). While they were still under warranty we replaced 50% of them and after warranty 100% of them were replaced using another brand.

This model was really bad, but he wasn’t wrong in general - while consumer drives have a higher failure rate, you can’t pretend the enterprise version can’t fail - and if you’ve built your system to withstand failure, whether 2 or 5 fail every year makes little difference if you have competent IT. I do make an effort to source them from as many different batches as possible, though - based on a DeskStar (“DeathStar”)…

> I do make an effort to source them from as many different batches as possible, though

If you can, also stagger the initial power ons. There's a history of disk firmware bugs that are triggered by runtime; if it makes sense, you want to have enough of a difference in power on time to do a lossless replacement on your first disk before your second disk hits the magic number of time on.

Re: ST3000DM001

#48

Post by lloeki »

grp000 wrote: post #44
myrandomcomment wrote: post #24

Back in the mid 90s I was working in IT at a midsized company. We used Compaq desktops (this is the Pentium Pro timeframe). The HD in the system where quantum fireball (IIRC). They failed at an amazing rate all in the first 3 months (30%). We called Compaq at one point and said, look we want replacement drives for all of our remaining systems. After much back and forth (stupid on their part as we had 1000+ machines o…

I'm not familiar with data center tools or terminology. What is a tazer in this context?

IIUC the same as in other contexts, the subtext being that in face of their refusal to replace these doomed HDs before a failure has registered, the failures were made to prematurely happen with a gentle stream of electrons.

Re: ST3000DM001

#49

Post by Lammy »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #30
colordrops wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Thailand story was a cover for the NSA buying a huge number of drives for the new data facility in Utah.

Too bad for the NSA that they couldn't use Chia mining as the cover back then. /s

Good thing NSA et al aren't also competing for parallel-computing hardware or it would be even harder to buy a new GPU. Luckily all participants in online discussion forums are real humans who can tell me what to blame :)

Re: ST3000DM001

#50

Post by Lammy »

3np wrote: post #40
colordrops wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Thailand story was a cover for the NSA buying a huge number of drives for the new data facility in Utah.

Source for this claim? Sounds entirely like unfounded speculation. (Wikipedia page on the facility in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center )

Yeah maybe it was just for the construction kickbacks and the datacenter is actually empty.
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