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How long do disk drives last?

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Re: How long do disk drives last?

#51

Post by toyg »

pedrocr wrote: post #49
velodrome wrote: post #34

The hard disk drive quality has dropped over the last few years. * Most consumer drives over 2TB have extremely poor reliability. Just check any Amazon or Newegg review (DOA and early mortality show up with more frequency). Yes, I know using reviews are not accurate but since there is no public information of drive failure rates there is not really much to go on. * The reduction of manufacturer warranty since Thailan…

Why avoid the green drives? I assumed those were less power hungry and spinning slower so more reliable. I've been ordering them for RAID5 arrays and not had too many issues yet.

My experience is that they spin down way too often for server usage, and eventually break much faster than others.

Some of them were also crippled in firmware so you couldn't use them in RAID1 arrays, but this might have changed.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#52

Post by nknighthb »

jve wrote: post #47
nknighthb wrote: post #42

These numbers line up nicely with what I've experienced on much smaller scales (I've never personally cared about more than a few hundred spinning drives at once), which is that in a nice mix of old, middle-aged, and new drives, 5-10% go kaput each year. Incidentally, about "consumer-grade drives", the last time I looked into this, I was led to believe that if it's SATA and 7200RPM (or less), there's no hardware dist…

Well Intel tells us different story[1] that promises 1. More performance 2. Less vibration (improves performance) 3. ECC Memory There is a long feature reference that mentions things like: higher RPM, more quality, larger magnets, air turbulance control, dual processors, etc. I'm not a spec in hard drives, just that I remember reading this stuff when trying to figure out do I need it. In the end, For my small-scale c…

A marketing team at Intel tells us a vague story about what is either a very vague or very specific set of drives, or may be about an entirely hypothetical set of drives. It's not clear.

They even admit to the problem themselves at the end:

"Some hard drive manufactures may differentiate enterprise from desktop drives by not testing certain enterprise-class features, validate the drives with different test criteria, or disable enterprise-class features on a desktop class hard drives so they can market and price them accordingly. Other manufacturers have different architectures and designs for the two drive classes. It can be difficult to get detailed information and specifications on different drive modes."

That PDF tells me nothing interesting. It's marketing crap for clueless executives, not a technical analysis. (Given their absurd obsession with "Higher RPM" as some sort of defining characteristic, it's not even relevant to the statement I made in the first place.)

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#53

Post by jankey »

Approximately 40 PB raw storage in our datacentres here, half of them Supermicro servers with whatever disk that came, half HP Proliant with $$$ HP Enterprise class disks, all 80% drives surviving after 5 years seems right, this is what we're seeing as well. The hardware is decommissioned faster then the drives fail.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#54

Post by pedrocr »

toyg wrote: post #51
pedrocr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why avoid the green drives? I assumed those were less power hungry and spinning slower so more reliable. I've been ordering them for RAID5 arrays and not had too many issues yet.

My experience is that they spin down way too often for server usage, and eventually break much faster than others. Some of them were also crippled in firmware so you couldn't use them in RAID1 arrays, but this might have changed.

Isn't spin down controlled by the host and not the drive?

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#55

Post by rdc12 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #24
skriticos2 wrote: post #22

Earlier 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 reliable are the networks in Africa? Outside of the cities?

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#57

Post by jzwinck »

pedrocr wrote: post #54
toyg wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is that they spin down way too often for server usage, and eventually break much faster than others. Some of them were also crippled in firmware so you couldn't use them in RAID1 arrays, but this might have changed.

Isn't spin down controlled by the host and not the drive?

Some drives like WD's Green series have variable RPM to save power (and therefore heat). I don't think the OS is involved at all with controlling how fast those disks spin (so long as they are spinning at all).

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#58

Post by jws »

pedrocr wrote: post #49
velodrome wrote: post #34

The hard disk drive quality has dropped over the last few years. * Most consumer drives over 2TB have extremely poor reliability. Just check any Amazon or Newegg review (DOA and early mortality show up with more frequency). Yes, I know using reviews are not accurate but since there is no public information of drive failure rates there is not really much to go on. * The reduction of manufacturer warranty since Thailan…

Why avoid the green drives? I assumed those were less power hungry and spinning slower so more reliable. I've been ordering them for RAID5 arrays and not had too many issues yet.

Greens have had problems with aggressive head parking. If you have an idle set of them you can go through their design limit of head parks in a couple of months and start to get failures shortly after. Done that.

Check your S.M.A.R.T data. Look at the head park number. (Load cycles I think it is called, can't look it up now). If it is a six digit number, you are in trouble. For a server you want if to be in the same order as to power ups. Anything else and you have to explain to yourself "why?"

Edit: adding. The 1TB and smaller greens were disasters. I ruined a lot of them. I was told all of the 2TB and up greens didn't have head park issues, but spent part of last week replacing a storage unit populated with 2TB greens when a spindle failed (>200 unrecoverable blocks) and found that some of the 2TB greens were load cycling into the 200000 range, others weren't running up. They were all identical models purchased at the same time. Maybe they had different firmware? I replaced hem with REDs. They aren't supposed to park and they won't try to recover a bad sector for more than a few seconds so the don't hang your RAID when they get bad sectors.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#59

Post by nknighthb »

jzwinck wrote: post #57
pedrocr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't spin down controlled by the host and not the drive?

Some drives like WD's Green series have variable RPM to save power (and therefore heat). I don't think the OS is involved at all with controlling how fast those disks spin (so long as they are spinning at all).

WD's marketroids tried very hard to give people that impression, but it's false.

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771...

At the very bottom, in small, grey text, you'll find "IntelliPower" defined as:

"A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. For each WD Green drive model, WD may use a different, invariable RPM."

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#60

Post by cnvogel »

pedrocr wrote: post #54
toyg wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is that they spin down way too often for server usage, and eventually break much faster than others. Some of them were also crippled in firmware so you couldn't use them in RAID1 arrays, but this might have changed.

Isn't spin down controlled by the host and not the drive?

The host can spin down a drive manually, but most often it's done autonomously be the drive.

‣  In Linux you can manually ...

• check the power state of your drive using: hdparm -C /dev/sda

• manually spin down the drive (standby) using: hdparm -y /dev/sda (it will immediately spin up at the first attempt to read a sector)

‣  Or you configure the automatic standby of the drive (which also does not involve the OS)...

• hdparm -S n /dev/sda will configure the timeout of the drive to a value encoding the time to spin-down on a non-linear scale, check the manpage

• hdparm -B n /dev/sda will configure another type of power management which doesn't specify a fixed timeout, but rather a vendor-defined type of arbitrary power saving measures on a scale of 1..254 (1: waste power, 254: conserve power, n>128 allows spin down)

The latter two options are handled internally by the drive and (as far as I know) even stored non-volatile.

http://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm

(Edit: fixed my broken English ;-) )

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