51–60 of 74 posts
> ambient temperature within a data center often increases during the summer months What? Isn't your Data Center supposed to be temperature controlled, where the A/C has a setpoint which it's keeping the entire environment to within a degree? Being able to tell what season it is based on your HDD SMART temperature (armchair expert here) sounds bad.
> ambient temperature within a data center often increases during the summer months What? Isn't your Data Center supposed to be temperature controlled, where the A/C has a setpoint which it's keeping the entire environment to within a degree? Being able to tell what season it is based on your HDD SMART temperature (armchair expert here) sounds bad.
Is moving the setpoint with the seasons, within tolerance of course, not a common energy savings method?
> The average age of the retired drives was just over eight years Didn't realize they can last so long.
My simple rule still stands even after 20 years: Avoid Seagate.
My simple rule in the same period: avoid WD at all costs, prefer HGST (which later became part of WD) and use Seagate mostly. I’ve seen variations of these personal rules, and during a time when Backblaze didn’t exist yet (and came up with better measurements on a larger scale), it was like one of those holy wars between tabs and spaces (or vi and emacs).
Toshiba got the 3.5" division. WD got the 2.5" division, anti-trust divesture (just 3 companies left): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Diagram_...
So then I start scanning the drive. The partition table was deleted, but it was full of data, most of it encrypted. It was also badly fragmented, so it was likely in some type of array. What I could recover in cleartext implied that it had been spun up for thousands of hours, in a Backblaze datacenter. It wasn't conclusive enough to go to Backblaze about it, so I just returned it to Amazon. I probably did a zero pass on it first, can't remember.
Encrypted or no, if that was a backblaze drive, they were disposing of drives with customer data still on them. I'm not surprised someone tried to pass it off as new on Amazon, that scam is old hat. I was very shocked to see the data still intact though.
Close to 10 years ago, I bought a "new" hard drive on Amazon. When I got it, I happened to notice some suspicious signs of wear, like corrosion on the PCB from someone's greasy fingerprint. I dive into the SMART stats and it's completely zeroed. Not quite what I'd expect from a new drive. So then I start scanning the drive. The partition table was deleted, but it was full of data, most of it encrypted. It was also ba…
Who cares if there was "customer data still on them" if it was encrypted? One of the nice things about encryption is that you don't have to worry about wiping drives.
> The average age of the retired drives was just over eight years Didn't realize they can last so long.
After that it went into my server at home. It was used for various things. At this point it’s spent the last 5 years as the disk my DVR records to. (Because 5 years ago I was expecting it to die any day and didn’t want anything more important on it…) So it’s being continuously written and rewritten 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
It’s now about 17 years old and has spent almost the entirety of that time powered on. It’s been packed up and sent on two cross country moves. Still kicking.
I have a number of WD Green 1.5TB drives that are nearly as old and still in daily use in the same server.
Maybe I’ve just had great luck, but I’d be more surprised by a drive dying sooner than eight years.
Close to 10 years ago, I bought a "new" hard drive on Amazon. When I got it, I happened to notice some suspicious signs of wear, like corrosion on the PCB from someone's greasy fingerprint. I dive into the SMART stats and it's completely zeroed. Not quite what I'd expect from a new drive. So then I start scanning the drive. The partition table was deleted, but it was full of data, most of it encrypted. It was also ba…
>it was full of data, most of it encrypted. [...] Encrypted or no, if that was a backblaze drive, they were disposing of drives with customer data still on them Who cares if there was "customer data still on them" if it was encrypted? One of the nice things about encryption is that you don't have to worry about wiping drives.
I used to like Samsung hard drives personally, Lacie used them in their rugged series and I found them to have pretty low failure rates. Seagate bought out Samsung's disk drive business in 2011 apparently. I guess Samsung saw the future of SSD's?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>it was full of data, most of it encrypted. [...] Encrypted or no, if that was a backblaze drive, they were disposing of drives with customer data still on them Who cares if there was "customer data still on them" if it was encrypted? One of the nice things about encryption is that you don't have to worry about wiping drives.
Sure.. until it gets decrypted
