What is the best hard drive? • Hacker News Board

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#111

Post by atYevP » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 2:15 AM UTC

bootload wrote: post #110

atYevP wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. It used to be that they were part of the URL (because of the way our blog was designed) but that is no longer the case. We decided to leave them off for a while to see if that made posts more "evergreen", but we definitely see where it can lead to some confusion. We'll keep chatting about it internally, there's likely…

"... Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. ..." @Yev, writing about specific technology is time-bound and doesn't exactly have the half life of DNA. Having said that, I appreciate all that Backblaze writes about hardware. It's interesting and easy to read. This takes time and thought, you (at Backblaze) must be doing something right.

Yea, for posts like this it certainly made sense to put dates on them, since the data has a shelf-life, but for other "entrepreneurship-centered" posts we figured it would be best if they seemed "fresh" forever, even if they'd get chronologically moved down on our own site, the search traffic would still have the posts appear "newish". We've since added all the dates on all the posts...as nature intended ;-)

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#112

Post by geofft » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 2:18 AM UTC

rasz_pl wrote: post #71

atYevP wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. It used to be that they were part of the URL (because of the way our blog was designed) but that is no longer the case. We decided to leave them off for a while to see if that made posts more "evergreen", but we definitely see where it can lead to some confusion. We'll keep chatting about it internally, there's likely…

hey Yev, how about something secure like TLS 1.2 on the blog? RC4 and 3DES are great if you are playing hackme's at defcon to let people break your 'secure' connections on the fly using laptop GPUs, but not on supposedly Secure Cloud Storage company blog.

One minor point since I see a lot of people get this wrong: 3DES is, to the best of anyone's (public) knowledge over the last like 35 years, secure to its intended security level (112 bits, which is basically fine). The only real problem with it is that it's ridiculously slow; there are plenty of faster stream ciphers with higher security levels. 1DES, meanwhile, is weak, but only because a 56-bit security level is useless today.

That said, yes, TLS 1.0, RC4, and SHA1 are all starting to smell, and it's probably time to toss them down the drain.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#113

Post by geofft » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 2:29 AM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #86

RickHull wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure if I trust what you guys did, calling the old Hitachi Drives as HGST. > I don't know if HGST drives are related to the old Hitachi models at all. FTA: > Some of the HGST drives listed were manufactured under their previous brand, Hitachi. We’ve been asked to use the HGST name and we have honored that request.

> We’ve been asked to use the HGST name and we have honored that request. // Intriguing - that suggests some sort of advertising deal? Which calls in to question the impartiality of the report. Who asked them? In what context? Why accede to a third parties interference in the report? Are Backblaze getting reduced price HGST drives now?

I'm a little confused why we expect people to be hostile to friendly requests in the absence of back-room dealing... what's the harm in saying "sure" and including that footnote? And don't we expect enough human decency for them to mention if there were financial considerations in the reporting?

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#114

Post by ValentineC » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 2:57 AM UTC

icodestuff wrote: post #68

Oof. I've got a NAS with 4 3TB Seagate Barracudas, same model number as the drives with the 46% failure rate. One's already failed, and I replaced it with the same model drive. Anyone have a recommendation for how to replace all the drives with more reliable models without wrecking the RAID? Downtime is okay, but I don't have spare space for the contents to make a giant backup. It's currently set up as a "Synology Hy…

Are you looking to replace all 4 disks at once?

If you have a spare PC lying around, check out the XPenology forums [1] for the software (specifically, NanoBoot or XPEnoboot) required to create your own Synology clone.

You'll be able to create a new SHR volume with new disks. As suggested in another post, do a file level copy to the new volume. You should then be able to replace all the disks in your actual Synology NAS with your new disks at once, and perform a migration [2] so everything works with your Synology hardware.

(This is possibly a better solution than replacing the disks one by one, since there's the risk of another disk failing while the RAID is being rebuilt.)

[1] http://xpenology.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2

[2] https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/tutorials/484

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#115

Post by Freaky » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 3:11 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #15

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3 TB drives are another story. We’ll cover how we handled their failure rates in a future blog post. I'm really looking forward to this... could it be a similar problem to the one that caused the huge amount of 7200.11 failures a few years ago?

Probably just more sensitive to vibration in long term use. 40% AFR in normal conditions would be insane, and I doubt we'd need Backblaze to point it out.

I have six ST3000DM001's and seven ST31500341AS's, all with about 2 years on the clock (~20,000 power-on hours). With 40% and 25% AFR's respectively, the odds of all thirteen surviving are:

1 / ((0.6 12) * (0.75 14)) = 1 in 25,782.

I doubt I'm that lucky.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#116

Post by schneider_sh » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 3:16 AM UTC

joering2 wrote: post #40

I think there has never been more personal piece of technology than your full of important data hard drive, especially pre-cloud era, when now people just don't worry much of a dying hardware. But back in the ole' days, every one of us have lost very personal data due to hardware failure at some point. And it's interesting how the opinion about brands are being formed. For example, my first drive that died was Seagat…

I had the opposite issue. Bought WD Black for my first PC build. It died within ~3 weeks. Bought another to replace it. Again dead within a month. Have about 8 Seagate drives now and have not had an issue at all. Will avoid WD at all costs now.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#117

Post by shampine » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 5:13 AM UTC

onethree wrote: post #102

shampine wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to the botched firmware ones (I think the firmware revision was SD15)? If so, at the time (~2008) I had an HTPC with 10 1TB-1.5TB drives with 6 of 10 affected by the firmware issues. I was able to successfully flash all my drives at the time with no data loss.

i built a pc for a family friend around that time... i'd spec'd it with a different drive, but they showed it to the IT guy at their work who recommended seagate. 6 months later the drive stopped working, and it had to be shipped to the other side of the world to be reflashed

Sadly you could only flash them if they were still working, you had to ship them if they bricked. I saw the bulletin and promptly flashed all mine before failure. Big pita tho.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#118

Post by IgorPartola » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 5:58 AM UTC

rootbear wrote: post #23

atYevP wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. It used to be that they were part of the URL (because of the way our blog was designed) but that is no longer the case. We decided to leave them off for a while to see if that made posts more "evergreen", but we definitely see where it can lead to some confusion. We'll keep chatting about it internally, there's likely…

As a general rule, I get really annoyed when I come across a web page and I can't tell how old it is, especially if it is information that is likely to age rapidly. I don't care if putting a date on the page makes it less "evergreen", hurts someones SEO stats or makes the flowers wilt, I just want to know if I can trust what I'm reading.

This. No debate necessary, just add the dates.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#119

Post by deanclatworthy » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 6:42 AM UTC

brianwski wrote: post #45

cjensen wrote: post #36

Love and appreciate that Backblaze presents this data, but there are some obvious issues: comparing the annual failure rate of a pool where avg. age is 1 year to a pool where avg. age is 3 years isn't a great comparison. Rather than annual rates, I'd really prefer to see failure rate after six months, one year, two years, etc. This would make it easier to answer questions like "was drive X always bad? Or just when ne…

Backblaze employee here - we're going to release the raw data in a couple weeks, so everybody can do their own analysis.

Can't wait for this, but it'd be great if you considered having "real-time"-ish data feed for everyone to hook into. Then we don't have to wait for the annual blog post ;-)

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#120

Post by ksec » Thu, Jan 22, 2015, 6:59 AM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #105

arthurfm wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The manufacturer of the hard drives was listed incorrectly by Backblaze. It's as simple as that. Hitachi (owned by Toshiba) and HGST (owned by WD) are two different companies. You can't say a drive was manufactured by Hitachi/Toshiba when it was actually a HGST drive.

If the drive has|had the Hitachi brand on it you absolutely can say that's what brand of drive it is|was. As I understand: WD bought HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), then sold on the manufacturing of 3.5" drives to Toshiba to comply with EU and FTC requirements ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/5635/western-digital-to-sell-h... ). WD retained the 2.5" side of the HGST manufacture. I doubt anyone wants to buy…

That is exactly how i understand it as well. HGST, or all HDD from Hitachi are now basically under Toshiba. Those 2.5" HDD capacity that sold to WD are all under WD brand.