31–40 of 52 posts
Didn't you brag about taking out HDD out of external drives to use in your DC? But now you are saying you can't even put a label on a drive?
Slightly off topic - I love the Backblaze reports. I'm in a situation where I need some 2.5" drives but I'm having a hard time finding reliable research information on reliability. Anyone have any tips?
Performance-wise, I have nothing but good things to say about the WD Black series and recent 7200rpm drives from HGST (formerly Hitachi, now owned by WD). Of course neither is any match to a decent SSD, but the 1TB models are 1/10 the price of a similarly sized SSD :)
For energy efficiency, on the other hand, any 5400rpm drive from WD or HGST will do. They are quiet and reliable.
As for Seagate, I've had at least two of their drives fail on me in the last few years, not to mention they feel significantly slower than similar drives from WD and HGST in typical laptop usage. Even a 5400rpm WD Blue can run circles around a 7200rpm Seagate drive.
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"
I love that it knows how to pronounce 3TB.
>> 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?
Didn't you brag about taking out HDD out of external drives to use in your DC? But now you are saying you can't even put a label on a drive?
Yev from Backblaze here -> sure we can, but the datacenter guys are very analytical, they take time in to consideration as theirs is at a premium, so they could do it in the datacenter, but we'd much rather have them prelabeled.
I find the problem with lack of serial number on the side of the hard drive to be a little silly. How hard would it be to get someone in your firm to simply place labels with serial numbers on the side of the Toshiba drives. It wouldn't take more then 10-20 minutes with a label maker.
That does introduce a human error based point of failure though - a few from a batch could have their labels mixed up.
Given how blackblaze's setup is described someone powering off the wrong drive or entire node by mistake due to a misidentified non-failed drive will not affect service at all, the built-in resilience to hardware failure will easily cover this, but there will still be some impact if only in the wasted man-time (for the original error and any resulting investigation & relabelling effort) and any light performance degradation as the affected node is brought back into service.
So for the number of drives they use, perhaps the manufacturers labelling the drives in a consistent manner is valuable enough to complain about not being the case.
I still wish they would clarify the language in their ads. When they say 'everything attached to your computer, all your external and internal drives completely unlimited for $5/month" they really should clarify they have no way to back up a NAS device.
Slightly off topic - I love the Backblaze reports. I'm in a situation where I need some 2.5" drives but I'm having a hard time finding reliable research information on reliability. Anyone have any tips?
Do you need high performance, energy efficiency, or a lot of space? Performance-wise, I have nothing but good things to say about the WD Black series and recent 7200rpm drives from HGST (formerly Hitachi, now owned by WD). Of course neither is any match to a decent SSD, but the 1TB models are 1/10 the price of a similarly sized SSD :) For energy efficiency, on the other hand, any 5400rpm drive from WD or HGST will do…
I thought it'd be interesting how your "1/10th the price" sounded ok but was actually more like 16% - 20% the cost. I'm constantly impressed by how the SSD prices keep falling.