How long do disk drives last? • Hacker News Board

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#131

Post by atYevP » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 12:52 AM UTC

dmourati wrote: post #121

secabeen wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Glacier is probably backed mostly by tape with a disk cache. Writing then becomes cheap, as you can grab the next blank tape, but restores take a while, as they have to pull the specific tapes needed from whatever storage system they're using.

Seriously doubt Amazon is using tape.

No one (outside Amazon) truly knows what Glacier is on, likely it is a combination, and tape may play a role, that's why it's relatively inexpensive to house the data, but the costs to get it back are very high and are for "emergency, everything else has failed" situations.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#132

Post by atYevP » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 12:55 AM UTC

headgasket wrote: post #25

We dont know, but backblaze sure knows how to: 1. print backblaze's brand as often as linguistically possible in the same article. 2. Get to the top of HN over a 50 yrs old technology's failure rate without clustering for brand spin speed density etc. (read not much) Am I unaware that there are new paid spots on the first page of HN? (it would make sense I guess, from a business perspective) TIA to anyone that can be…

Yev from Backblaze | One might say that we are "Backblazing a trail"? To my knowledge we've never paid for a HN top article. People tend to like our pod and storage related stuff and we're always thrilled to see it on here, so we come and chat about it along with everyone. The discussions are awesome. I'll chat with the writing team to see if we can take out one or two Backblaze's from future posts ;-)

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#133

Post by atYevP » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 12:59 AM UTC

WatchDog wrote: post #2

Do they plan on sharing any data on which vendors and models have the highest failure rates?

Yev on Backblaze | We actually hope to see if we can collect enough data to release a "per manufacturer" report on had drive failure. We're currently collecting that data, but as always, follow the Backblaze Blog for info on that type of stuff!

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#134

Post by headgasket » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 1:11 AM UTC

atYevP wrote: post #132

headgasket wrote: post #25

We dont know, but backblaze sure knows how to: 1. print backblaze's brand as often as linguistically possible in the same article. 2. Get to the top of HN over a 50 yrs old technology's failure rate without clustering for brand spin speed density etc. (read not much) Am I unaware that there are new paid spots on the first page of HN? (it would make sense I guess, from a business perspective) TIA to anyone that can be…

Yev from Backblaze | One might say that we are "Backblazing a trail"? To my knowledge we've never paid for a HN top article. People tend to like our pod and storage related stuff and we're always thrilled to see it on here, so we come and chat about it along with everyone. The discussions are awesome. I'll chat with the writing team to see if we can take out one or two Backblaze's from future posts ;-)

Hey, it was tongue-in-cheek. Your service looks awesome, and as an awareness piece it was bang on. Although I don't recall hearing about backblaze before, the name has been ringing in my ears all day. Keep up the good work and good luck!

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#135

Post by atYevP » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 1:12 AM UTC

ffrryuu wrote: post #117

crpatino wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the linear extrapolation they make over the third year failure data into the future (to calculate an estimated half life of roughly 6 years), I would say they probably have not. A little statistics is a dangerous thing.

Well, as long as they IPO before that happens...

Yev from Backblaze | I know, right?

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#136

Post by atYevP » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 1:25 AM UTC

ffrryuu wrote: post #106

Has blackblaze budgeted for the cliff failure rate that is coming?

Yev from Backblaze | Somewhat. Luckily, not all the drives fail at the same time. If a drive fails in one pod we replace it, so even if there is a large fall-off after 5-6 years, it won't be like we are losing a majority of our farm in one fell swoop. We buy our gear as we need it and have lots of drives to spare, so unless all drives automatically shut off after 6 years (which they don't) we should be OK ;-)

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#137

Post by atYevP » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 1:26 AM UTC

leapius wrote: post #13

I think the floods has probably been a factor in reduced reliability. It took forever for prices to come down to where they were and the manufacturers are probably cutting corners everywhere to save costs. Why ramp up factories when the tech itself is on the way out? I think this is most evident in the reduced warranty periods compared to before when 5 years was quite normal.

Yev from Backblaze | Yes, prices still haven't come back down to pre-flood levels unfortunately. They used to drop about 4% per month in price (over time) but now it's going down more slowly.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#138

Post by lingben » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 1:38 AM UTC

atYevP wrote: post #123

wazoox wrote: post #82

There are extremely large difference in reliability between different drives makes and models. Here are a couple of numbers (we're building storage servers, running 24/24 in various environments): * my company installed about 4500 Seagate Barracuda ES2 (500 GB, 750 GB and mostly 1TB) between 2008 and 2010. These drives are utter crap, in 5 years we got about 1500 failures, much worse than the previous generation (250…

Yev from Backblaze -> We love Hitachi drives. They make us really happy. Unfortunately they are also more expensive than WD and Seagates, and since our #1 factor in drive purchasing is price, we don't get them very often :(

But aren't Hitachi drives now owned by WD?

http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/07/western-digital-buys-hitac...

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#139

Post by morganw » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 1:46 AM UTC

baruch wrote: post #114

dmourati wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cap=capacitor. http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/MegaRAID%20SAS/MegaRAID%... Edited to add: They've optimized for hardware purchase price and given up reliability (HW RAID, battery, cap), performance, and maintainability. The strange thing is the overall cost of the storage system is driven by power, not purchase price. Smarter RAID controllers, like I link above, let you manage power by spinning down disks as they…

Their use case is mostly write-once, they fill the data and never delete. The write-rate is probably more limited by the upload speeds of its users than the disk bandwidth and the multitude of port-multipliers that they use. Recovery is anyway mostly about copying all the user data to an external HDD and ship that which is a lot less performance critical as shipping the HDD will take a lot longer than reading all the…

> Recovery is anyway mostly about copying all the user data to an external HDD and ship that which is a lot less performance critical as shipping the HDD will take a lot longer than reading all the data from across their systems.

I've restored just a few files from Backblaze. While it's an "offline" operation where you choose the file, then get a notification when it's ready to be downloaded, it took only a handful of minutes.

It's not why I signed up with them, but it was delightful that it worked.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#140

Post by aaronz8 » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 2:35 AM UTC

I was going to say, I learned about this in class! Then I read the article and the link to "CMU’s study." ... My professor was one of the authors. Go Garth Gibson!