Wow! Great info in here!
How long do disk drives last?
151–160 of 162 posts
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#152There 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 isn't it cheaper on the long run if your drives fail less often?
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#153Earlier 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 isn't it cheaper on the long run if your drives fail less often?
Depends on a lot of factors, including your internal rate of return.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#154Earlier 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.
Yep, that's it. The servers I run are all personal and their main workload is keeping my files safe. Being able to survive 2 drive failures in all situations is important. I just discovered in this thread that on that RAID6 array 2 drives are actually suffering from excessive head-parking. So having used RAID6 and bought 2 different types of drives bought me some insurance against the simultaneous failure of the two drives. The performance is fine anyway.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, depending on the bug source. But the bug source might be related to reads. Nobody knows. Splitting the risk across two different vendors / implementations seems to be good insurance.
I mostly handle server appliances and the read-only boot disk is bread-and-butter for anything I do. Bonus points for using initramfs and never hitting the boot disk after the initial boot is completed. But if you stick to boot SSDs that are read and written to using different makes sounds like a good strategy.
It would of course be hard to avoid read-only flash no matter what you did - both bios and pxe rom from the ethernet card would presumably be read only flash today (that is writeable, but in practice only used for reading).
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#156Articles like this one are the reason I went with backblaze over carbonite. It may not mean their tech is any better, but it does 1) increase my confidence in them and 2) teach me something interesting each time. Both of those are, in my book, good reasons for giving them my money.
I only wish you'd consider a (possible different-brand) spin-off that targeted server backup and/or power users :-)
Amazon could use some competition in this space, IMNHO.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
RAID10 only gives you room for one disk failure in some scenarios.
Yep, that's it. The servers I run are all personal and their main workload is keeping my files safe. Being able to survive 2 drive failures in all situations is important. I just discovered in this thread that on that RAID6 array 2 drives are actually suffering from excessive head-parking. So having used RAID6 and bought 2 different types of drives bought me some insurance against the simultaneous failure of the two…
And for anyone that doesn't think this is worthwhile:
We recently had 3 servers have two drives each fail within hours of each other, with about two weeks between each of the 3 servers. These were 3 out of 4 servers that had been configured at the same time, with drives from the same delivery - clearly something had gone wrong.
Usually we try to drive types, but we didn't have enough suitable drives when we had to bring these up. Thankfully we do have everything replicated multiple times and very much specifically avoided replicating things from one of the new servers to another.
When we brought them back online we got a chance to juggle drives around, so now they're nicely mixed in case we get more failures.
For my private setup, I've gone with a mirror + rsync to a separate drive with an entirely different filesystem + Crashplan. Setups like that seems paranoid until you suffer a catastrophic loss or near loss...
My first big scare like that was a decade or so ago when we had a 10 or 12 drive array of IBM Deathstar (Deskstars) that started failing, one drive after the other, about a week apart, and the array just barely managed to rebuild... Particularly because it slowed the array down so much during the rebuild, that we were unable to complete a backup a day while running our service too, and taking downtime was unacceptable. So our backups lagged further and further behind while we waited for the next drive failure.. Those were some tense weeks.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, that's it. The servers I run are all personal and their main workload is keeping my files safe. Being able to survive 2 drive failures in all situations is important. I just discovered in this thread that on that RAID6 array 2 drives are actually suffering from excessive head-parking. So having used RAID6 and bought 2 different types of drives bought me some insurance against the simultaneous failure of the two…
And for anyone that doesn't think this is worthwhile: We recently had 3 servers have two drives each fail within hours of each other, with about two weeks between each of the 3 servers. These were 3 out of 4 servers that had been configured at the same time, with drives from the same delivery - clearly something had gone wrong. Usually we try to drive types, but we didn't have enough suitable drives when we had to br…
That's a great example of what I worry about. On my first server I bought 4 identical drives when I built it and then when I needed more space I again bought 4 identical larger drives. Since this was all on RAID5 the risk was actually pretty high. On my second server I bought two of each manufacturer and used RAID6 so now I can survive a whole batch going wrong at the same time. Next time I need to build one from scratch I may even go for 4 different drives (mixing red/green/etc).
What I am doing now as soon as I get unrecoverable errors from the drives is to replace them one at a time with whatever is the best cost/TB drive. Whenever all the drives have been upgraded I can resize the array to the new minimum drive size.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#159Earlier 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 isn't it cheaper on the long run if your drives fail less often?
Technically yes, especially from a manpower perspective (Takes folks to replace the drives), and it gets factored in to our "what are we willing to pay" model, so far, cheaper drive still win out over longevity. Now, this is different from other people with large data farms, we operate a bit differently, but thus far cheaper drives make more business sense. If that ever changes, we'll switch to the good stuff :)
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
thanks