Its complicated. Here's a link to a paper modeling disk drive failure in data centers. tl;dr: its about half a percent per 1000 hrs operation.
How long do disk drives last?
21–30 of 162 posts
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#22I wonder how many will die before they age out of usefulness. If you're still spinning 250Gb hard disks which are using the same power and space that a 4Tb drive could be using - it might not actually be economically sensible to keep running them. Certainly the old 9.1Gb SCSI disks that were so popular 10 years ago are well past be justifiable to give power to now.
That may be true for blackblaze. But these drives will still be useful. What about, say, shipping them to ONGs located in Africa?
That's a horrible idea! The logistics to collect and ship the old tech to Africa alone would probably cost more then just buying it bulk from China and ship in one batch.
But there are other considerations:
* This would also result in a big pile of waste in Africa, as their recycling infrastructure is limited.
* They need food, shelter, stable politics and functional education before they can make any use of computers.
* They have limited energy supply. Low powered tablets / laptops are much more useful.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#23You can use default warranty information to figure out the lower bound on useful life. Companies price the value of the warranty into the product and perform statistical QA to ensure that 95%-99% of all products released will work correctly for the length of the standard warranty. Also added warranties aren't worth the cost. Just replace the product when it breaks.
Agreed. Pretty much they assume you won't return a failed drive either. Since they last about as long as the warranty, you have only a few weeks at best to remember to send it in for replacement.
I've been hit-and-miss, gotten a few drives replaced, had a few warranties expire. But pretty much every disk drive fails eventually.
Think about it - its a commodity. If it lasted much longer than the warranty, they spent too much on robustness for the price.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
That may be true for blackblaze. But these drives will still be useful. What about, say, shipping them to ONGs located in Africa?
That's a horrible idea! The logistics to collect and ship the old tech to Africa alone would probably cost more then just buying it bulk from China and ship in one batch. But there are other considerations: * This would also result in a big pile of waste in Africa, as their recycling infrastructure is limited. * They need food, shelter, stable politics and functional education before they can make any use of computer…
Agreed. Better yet, keep them in a Google data center. Its far more efficient to make cloud storage available at a reasonable price. How about a diskless laptop that boots from cloud storage? That would be a sweet spot economically (depending on network costs I guess).
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#25We 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 of help on this, cheerio, (and good luck to Blackblaze, backblaze a path to a backblazing success!)
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#26It depends on the warranty period of the drive. Your hard drive manufacturer knows precisely how long the drive will last and sets their warranty period to expire right before your drive gives up the ghost.
Yeah, if that was true that would be completely against EU regulations,so you could sue manufacturers and win millions. So if you have any proof that they are doing that, you are practically a millionaire, I don't know why are you not on your way to the court yet.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#27Do they plan on sharing any data on which vendors and models have the highest failure rates?
From what I understand, at this point all 3 major hard disk vendors have very similar failure rates. The thing to look out for is that certain runs of drives may be "contaminated" during the manufacturing process, but knowing which ones is pretty unpredictable.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#28Not long.
Surprisingly long, all things considered.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a horrible idea! The logistics to collect and ship the old tech to Africa alone would probably cost more then just buying it bulk from China and ship in one batch. But there are other considerations: * This would also result in a big pile of waste in Africa, as their recycling infrastructure is limited. * They need food, shelter, stable politics and functional education before they can make any use of computer…
Agreed. Better yet, keep them in a Google data center. Its far more efficient to make cloud storage available at a reasonable price. How about a diskless laptop that boots from cloud storage? That would be a sweet spot economically (depending on network costs I guess).
>How about a diskless laptop that boots from cloud storage?
While this is a cool idea, how much bandwidth would you need to boot at roughly the same speed you do today? Some SSDs have 500 MB/s (~4 Gbit) read. You'd need to have gigabit networking with almost zero latency for that to perform well.
I suppose a smaller OS like Chrome OS would be perfect for that. Even if this worked on fiber, how would you boot over a cellular network? Aside from costing you a ton of money, it would take forever to download.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#30Do they plan on sharing any data on which vendors and models have the highest failure rates?
From what I understand, at this point all 3 major hard disk vendors have very similar failure rates. The thing to look out for is that certain runs of drives may be "contaminated" during the manufacturing process, but knowing which ones is pretty unpredictable.
Also some combinations of devices can create problems. We had a RAID controller that randomly rebuild mirrored sets because the drive was 'dead'. After the rebuild the drive seemed fine. We concluded there was some firmware delay that caused the controller to time out some operation and call the drive 'failed'.
We replaced the drives with a different brand and the 'failures' went away.