Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How long do disk drives last?

blog.backblaze.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 162 posts

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#141

Post by brdrak »

pedrocr wrote: post #102
pedrocr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you mean Start_Stop_Count. A quick check on two servers, each with 4 green drives in RAID6 and RAID5 setups tells me this hasn't been a problem. Both have Start_Stop_Count's below 100 (on the order of the number of boots the servers have had). I don't see any other number that could be the head park. The number I have been finding to be high is Hardware_ECC_Recovered (values between 1036555546 and 2699460003…

I may have spoke too soon. One of my servers has 2 Samsung Green and 2 WD Green drives in RAID6. Here's the SMART value that you seem to be discussing: $ for dev in `ls /dev/sd?`; do echo $dev; sudo smartctl -a $dev | grep Load_Cycle_Count; done | cut -d " " -f 2,40 /dev/sda Load_Cycle_Count 24 /dev/sdb Load_Cycle_Count 24 /dev/sdc Load_Cycle_Count 1947798 /dev/sdd Load_Cycle_Count 1907706 sda and sdb are the samsung…

I'm curious, why run 4 disks in RAID6 instead of RAID10? You loose two disks worth of capacity to RAID in either case, but with RAID6 there's also parity overhead, slower recovery, slower performance, especially in degraded mode?

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#142

Post by magila »

lingben wrote: post #138
atYevP wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

While operating under the same corporate umbrella, the engineering divisions of WDC and HGST are being kept separate for now as part of an agreement with the Chinese to get their approval for the acquisition. The upshot of this is that HGST drives are going to be a completely separate product line for at least the next few years.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#143

Post by mvgoogler »

nether wrote: post #74

Does ANYONE know what hard drives Google, Facebook, and Dropbox use at their datacenters? This 2006 article says Google buys Seagate: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2006/11/16/seagate-ceo-google-we... .

This is the only publicly published information that's even slightly relevant (AFAIK): http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf. It doesn't mention any manufacturers by name, but you should be able to draw some inferences from the paper.

I'm not sure that the information would be all that valuable anyway. Google's data-center environments, workloads and requirements are likely pretty different than your environment and requirements, so I'm not sure how the information would be useful?

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#144

Post by tracker1 »

baruch wrote: post #93
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #67

Sysadmin here. My experience: 1. Infant mortality. Drives fail after a couple months of use. 2. 3 year mark. This is where fails begin for typical work loads. 3. 4-6 year mark. This is when you can expect the drives that haven't failed earlier to fail. By this point, we're looking at 33% fail. Interesting that my experiences roughly match up with Chart 1. My experiences are 10 to 15k SAS drives. Slower moving 7200rpm…

I've used mostly 7200rpm SATA and Nearline-SAS and they are mostly fine in fact, didn't play enough with higher rpm SAS yet but so far I don't see a big difference between them and the 7200 NL-SAS drives. I'd echo the sentiment seen elsewhere in the comments about Seagate drives vs. Hitachi drives. Both for SATA and NL-SAS. Hitachi 1TB were rock solid compared to Seagate.

Completely anecdotal... but, the 640gb two platter drives have seemed to be the most rock solid.. ymmv though... With the much larger, and much more expensive (since the taiwan floods) drives, who knows anymore... it's relatively anecdotal for anyone at this point, since after 3-5 years all the warranties have expired.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#145

Post by Spooky23 »

brdrak wrote: post #141
pedrocr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may have spoke too soon. One of my servers has 2 Samsung Green and 2 WD Green drives in RAID6. Here's the SMART value that you seem to be discussing: $ for dev in `ls /dev/sd?`; do echo $dev; sudo smartctl -a $dev | grep Load_Cycle_Count; done | cut -d " " -f 2,40 /dev/sda Load_Cycle_Count 24 /dev/sdb Load_Cycle_Count 24 /dev/sdc Load_Cycle_Count 1947798 /dev/sdd Load_Cycle_Count 1907706 sda and sdb are the samsung…

I'm curious, why run 4 disks in RAID6 instead of RAID10? You loose two disks worth of capacity to RAID in either case, but with RAID6 there's also parity overhead, slower recovery, slower performance, especially in degraded mode?

RAID10 only gives you room for one disk failure in some scenarios.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#146

Post by chemmail »

nisa wrote: post #81
WatchDog wrote: post #2

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

Backblaze wrote about it here (2011): http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v... and here (2013): http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibration... We are constantly looking at new hard drives, evaluating them for reliability and power consumption. The Hitachi 3TB drive (Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630) is our current favorite for both its low power demand and astounding rel…

While WD has taken over Hitachi, they had to give Toshiba Hitachi's desktop 3.5" HDD operations in part of the deal of taking over Toshiba's (TSDT) Thailand factory. So if you want Hitachi's good 'ol reliability, buy Toshiba desktop drives.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#147

Post by [deleted] »

Spooky23 wrote: post #145
brdrak wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, why run 4 disks in RAID6 instead of RAID10? You loose two disks worth of capacity to RAID in either case, but with RAID6 there's also parity overhead, slower recovery, slower performance, especially in degraded mode?

RAID10 only gives you room for one disk failure in some scenarios.

[deleted]

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#148

Post by dmourati »

atYevP wrote: post #131
dmourati wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Asked what IT equipment Glacier uses, Amazon told ZDNet it does not run on tape. "Essentially you can see this as a replacement for tape," a company spokesman said via email.

http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-launches-glacier-cloud-storage-h...

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Glacier#Storage

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#149

Post by bobbles »

Since there seem to be backblaze staff posting in the thread, is there anyway as a 'personal' (non-business) user to have multiple PCs configured with one account? Think of something like a family plan.

Can't seem to find relevant information on the website anywhere for this.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#150

Post by patrickg_zill »

dmourati wrote: post #88

Ugh. Backblaze is one of those companies with an extraordinarily poor design that they flout and "open source" as if anyone would follow their lead. Take a look at the physical design of their system and combine that with the published data. Consider that to remove any harddrive from their setup requires physically removing a 4u rackmount storage pod from the rack. http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-…

HW Raid is a PITA for the following reasons:

1. you have to muck around with more firmware and sometimes reboot in order for changes to take effect

2. if a controller dies, you have to replace it with (almost) the exact same controller in order to read the data

3. Datacenters rarely lose power, take the HW raid money and instead put servers on true A+B power feeds.

CPUs are so fast these days that they can easily handle in software all the "stuff" that HW raid used to do.

Post reply on HN