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A Look at Backblaze’s Toshiba Hard Drives

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Re: A Look at Backblaze’s Toshiba Hard Drives

#21

Post by userbinator »

bluedino wrote: post #2

>> HGST, Seagate and Western Digital drives all have the serial number of the drive on the top end of the drive. Toshiba drives do not. Is simply printing and adding a label to each hard drive not enough, is it too error-prone, or what?

It wouldn't be hard to determine whether the barcode/number on the end is unique or not - if it isn't, you'd probably find collisions very easily especially within ones of the same batch.

I did a bit of searching (there's a noticeable shortage of photos of Toshiba HDD ends on the Internet...) and figure that it's probably some sort of batch code - the 3 I could find and read were POU34250025173, POU34250027527, and POU37250019573. The one in Backblaze's photo is POU34350016620.

Re: A Look at Backblaze’s Toshiba Hard Drives

#22

Post by monochromatic »

atYevP wrote: post #7
bluedino wrote: post #2

>> HGST, Seagate and Western Digital drives all have the serial number of the drive on the top end of the drive. Toshiba drives do not. Is simply printing and adding a label to each hard drive not enough, is it too error-prone, or what?

Yev from Backblaze here -> The drive manufacturer won't do it for us (at least not at our scale). We're currently chatting to some channel retailers that would be able to do it for us and allow us to scale a little bit. It was discouraging us from buying in larger quantities, but if the price of the drive + labeling works out, we'll try some larger orders.

Sounds like a job for a temp.

Re: A Look at Backblaze’s Toshiba Hard Drives

#23

Post by abrowne »

clunkclunk wrote: post #5
outworlder wrote: post #4

>> Failure: Disk 0491/sdag doesn’t contain a valid partition table >> Pod0491: >> x Replace sdag (Z252A34AS) with a new 3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300 >> x Reboot Pod0491 and re-add new sdag to sync I wish they fed that to a sound synthesizer with a 'Borg' voice. Coolest datacenter ever.

In Mac OS X Terminal: say -v Trinoids "Failure: Disk 0491/sdag doesn’t contain a valid partition table. Pod0491: Replace sdag (Z252A34AS) with a new 3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300. Reboot Pod0491 and re-add new sdag to sync. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own"

I think I prefer Zarvox ($ say -v Zarvox ...).

Re: A Look at Backblaze’s Toshiba Hard Drives

#24

Post by abrowne »

wiredfool wrote: post #16
clunkclunk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Mac OS X Terminal: say -v Trinoids "Failure: Disk 0491/sdag doesn’t contain a valid partition table. Pod0491: Replace sdag (Z252A34AS) with a new 3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300. Reboot Pod0491 and re-add new sdag to sync. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own"

Not sure if I want to tell the kids about that one or not. I may not hear the end of it. (or at least, the half hour each till parental controls kicks them out)

It's even more fun if you teach them "sleep" too, so it will start speaking at unexpected times.

Re: A Look at Backblaze’s Toshiba Hard Drives

#26

Post by ChuckMcM »

atYevP wrote: post #14
DannyBee wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drives don't get delivered in pods for you, right? So why is this not just part of the "take all drives from large box/crate/etc" process for the drives? IE whoever is taking them out of boxes puts them down, one by one, in a simple little labeling machine that slaps label on them (and records into a stupid database the label). If you want something more advanced, labeling machine has small camera that takes pict…

We do not get them delivered in pods no, we put them in at the datacenter. We don't do it because of the time constraints. Lets say it takes 30 seconds to do one individual drive. With 45 drives in a chassis that's 22 minutes per pod, and we get a ton of pods and drives delivered at once. Our datacenter techs are busy enough as it is, so if we can offload them, we try to. Now, if these drives were inexpensive and had…

Yev, if you're taking a drive out of the anti-static bag and installing it in a machine it takes slightly less than 3 seconds to pull an asset tag bar code off a sheet of printed labels and stick it on the drive. Two scans of the drive asset tag, serial number on the label, and poof you are done.

A very large consumer of drives at a previous employer :-) did this pretty efficiently. When we expanded our cluster for Blekko we did this for the 5000 drives we got from Western digital (well the scanning, we didn't really need an asset tag) and it goes really quickly with a code scanner in hand and a python script recording the values.

Re: A Look at Backblaze’s Toshiba Hard Drives

#27

Post by moe »

atYevP wrote: post #14
DannyBee wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drives don't get delivered in pods for you, right? So why is this not just part of the "take all drives from large box/crate/etc" process for the drives? IE whoever is taking them out of boxes puts them down, one by one, in a simple little labeling machine that slaps label on them (and records into a stupid database the label). If you want something more advanced, labeling machine has small camera that takes pict…

We do not get them delivered in pods no, we put them in at the datacenter. We don't do it because of the time constraints. Lets say it takes 30 seconds to do one individual drive. With 45 drives in a chassis that's 22 minutes per pod, and we get a ton of pods and drives delivered at once. Our datacenter techs are busy enough as it is, so if we can offload them, we try to. Now, if these drives were inexpensive and had…

We don't do it because of the time constraints. Lets say it takes 30 seconds to do one individual drive.

But in your article you claim that the unlabeled Toshiba drives lengthen the maintenance time by "a few minutes" every time they fail.

Since all drives eventually fail, wouldn't it make sense to trade those "few minutes" at the end of the lifecycle for a constant 30 seconds at the beginning?

Re: A Look at Backblaze’s Toshiba Hard Drives

#28

Post by rodgerd »

js2 wrote: post #15

The first hard drive I used was a 40 MB Seagate, $900 in 1989. It was the size of a hefty phone book. The first NetApp Filer I used had 4 GB drives, total capacity a few hundred GB, don't recall cost (not cheap), in 1997. It was the size of a small closet. The first EMC I used had drives of size I don't recall, total capacity in the TB, for unimaginable prices, in 2000. It was the size of small room. We're up to 8 TB…

When I consider that my phone has a 64 GB SD card smaller than my little fingernail, I feel the same way.

Re: A Look at Backblaze’s Toshiba Hard Drives

#29

Post by atYevP »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #26
atYevP wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not get them delivered in pods no, we put them in at the datacenter. We don't do it because of the time constraints. Lets say it takes 30 seconds to do one individual drive. With 45 drives in a chassis that's 22 minutes per pod, and we get a ton of pods and drives delivered at once. Our datacenter techs are busy enough as it is, so if we can offload them, we try to. Now, if these drives were inexpensive and had…

Yev, if you're taking a drive out of the anti-static bag and installing it in a machine it takes slightly less than 3 seconds to pull an asset tag bar code off a sheet of printed labels and stick it on the drive. Two scans of the drive asset tag, serial number on the label, and poof you are done. A very large consumer of drives at a previous employer :-) did this pretty efficiently. When we expanded our cluster for B…

Sure, maybe my math was off, I'm not a datacenter guy, they are very efficient ;-) It comes down to cost/time. We did small-scale tests and they went pretty well. We're hoping to avoid the manual process on our end, but if we can't get a distributor to label them and it makes financial sense to buy the Toshiba's, we'll do it ourselves :)

Re: A Look at Backblaze’s Toshiba Hard Drives

#30

Post by atYevP »

moe wrote: post #27
atYevP wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not get them delivered in pods no, we put them in at the datacenter. We don't do it because of the time constraints. Lets say it takes 30 seconds to do one individual drive. With 45 drives in a chassis that's 22 minutes per pod, and we get a ton of pods and drives delivered at once. Our datacenter techs are busy enough as it is, so if we can offload them, we try to. Now, if these drives were inexpensive and had…

We don't do it because of the time constraints. Lets say it takes 30 seconds to do one individual drive. But in your article you claim that the unlabeled Toshiba drives lengthen the maintenance time by "a few minutes" every time they fail. Since all drives eventually fail, wouldn't it make sense to trade those "few minutes" at the end of the lifecycle for a constant 30 seconds at the beginning?

Certainly, at least mathematically. If we ramp up the Toshiba purchases and cannot get them pre-labeled, we'll definitely do it on our end, though we think we'll be able to get them labeled ahead of time from some channel partners. At least we hope, signs look good :)
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