How times have changed; Seagate used to be (or at least have the reputation of being) the most reliable and Hitachi the least.
Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014
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Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014
#22Biggest takeaway was at the end, with the "enterprise" drives being slightly less reliable than the consumer ones at half the cost.
I don't believe reliability has ever necessarily been an "enterprise" feature.
The concrete features I understand "enterprise" drives as having are:
1) firmware is built with RAID in mind. This might sound weird, but consumer drives are more likely to have problems with RAID, just because they aren't designed for it. See, for example, the first WD Green drives crashing RAID clusters because some timeout was too high.
2) Longer warranty period
3) This may not be true anymore, but I believe they typically feature larger cache
4) ECC
[1]: http://www.pantz.org/hardware/disks/what_makes_a_hard_drive_...
Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014
#23Let's get a blog post describing how they handled reimbursements for the drive farming. I imagine it to be incredibly complicated to cross reference a receipt with a product at that scale , especially since all the products were the same.
Andy from Backblaze here: Here's the post we did about that if you're interested: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/crowdsourcing-hard-drives/
Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014
#24I wish there was something similar for SSDs.
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Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014
#25How times have changed; Seagate used to be (or at least have the reputation of being) the most reliable and Hitachi the least.
They bought Maxtor and kept the crappy Chinese plants. Interestingly they don't sell the Chinese 3.5" drives at Costco (where they can easily get returned) right now...
Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014
#26I wish there was something similar for SSDs.
There is, roughly. This is a lab test as opposed to production monitoring, but it is still interesting. Obviously SSDs and HDDs are quite different technically, so the appropriate test is quite different. They write data continuously to see how long they last.
We've now written over a petabyte, and only half of the SSDs remain. Three drives failed at different points—and in different ways—before reaching the 1PB milestone[1]
http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014
#27Biggest takeaway was at the end, with the "enterprise" drives being slightly less reliable than the consumer ones at half the cost.
And thats whats weird, who is the audience for the article? I know what enterprise drive means and I know the author is smart and knows what it means, so why the weird implications in the article that have nothing to do with "enterprise"? For those not "in the know" the hardware is the same, but desktop firmware drives will sit there for 10 seconds or whatever it is beating the drive when there's a read (or write) fa…
unlike consumer drives which statistically are never replaced under guarantee
They're never replaced because regular consumers statistically don't ask for replacement and simply eat the loss?
Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014
#28At a glance, it appears that the Hitachi's are far more reliable, but looking at the average age, we really see that the graph is worthless (as is most of the data provided).
Average Age: 13.4 Seagate 7.3 Hitachi
I'll skip the next "update" and save myself the 5 minutes of wasted time.
Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014
#29Biggest takeaway was at the end, with the "enterprise" drives being slightly less reliable than the consumer ones at half the cost.
And thats whats weird, who is the audience for the article? I know what enterprise drive means and I know the author is smart and knows what it means, so why the weird implications in the article that have nothing to do with "enterprise"? For those not "in the know" the hardware is the same, but desktop firmware drives will sit there for 10 seconds or whatever it is beating the drive when there's a read (or write) fa…
Do you have any data to back up any of these claims?
Because now I have a problem: should I believe guys who have been running 38 petabytes of storage for several years now and regularly present the data they gathered, or should I believe you?
Re: Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
And thats whats weird, who is the audience for the article? I know what enterprise drive means and I know the author is smart and knows what it means, so why the weird implications in the article that have nothing to do with "enterprise"? For those not "in the know" the hardware is the same, but desktop firmware drives will sit there for 10 seconds or whatever it is beating the drive when there's a read (or write) fa…
I'm not sure who the audience is, but thank you for your explanation of the differences between consumer and enterprise drive firmwares. That runs counter to my naive assumptions, which was that "enterprise" targeted things tend to be of higher reliability and quality than the consumer-targeted alternatives. I imagine someone in the drive / enterprise storage business would know better, but many of us might not have…
"tend to be of higher reliability and quality"
Oh I should preface my remarks with "in family, same technology level" etc.
I'm talking about the same package with the same storage where different firmwares are loaded. Thats the business model the OP is in, he makes posts about stripping consumer drives out of external cases and I don't want to speak for him but he radiates the impression of their whole secret sauce being reliability at the system level not the hardware level.
It is true in my experience that "exotic hardware" marketed as enterprise grade is different physical hardware and is going to be a different level of reliability than consumer hardware.
So the difference between an office NAS SATA 1 TB enterprise and consumer grade is a firmware load, and I think thats what the article is talking about. There is a big difference between a 15K SAS enterprise server drive and a 7200 SATA consumer drive at the hardware level, but that's not the article author's "thing".