Earlier 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…
How long do disk drives last?
61–70 of 162 posts
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#62tl;dr: Here's some statistically significant data on how 25000 drives have worked over 4 years, please now comment on how the 3 drives you've owned died.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I'm thinking, because they got network late, maybe better than my house in Iowa. I'm still on copper.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#64We 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…
There's always been paid articles. This is not one of them. They get to the front page because they're usually well written, contain interesting information, and are relevant to the HN user base.
Don't like it? Don't vote for it.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#65If some of them live a long, long time, it makes it hard to compute the average. Also, a few outliers can throw off the average and make it less useful. Proper statistical analysis would help you there.
Simply using a median solves some of these problems pretty easily.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#66Earlier 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.
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…
This might be anecdotal but external WD (MyLife) drives are usually from the Green series and I had 2 different ones fail on me after about 1 year of use. Same happened to 2 friends of mine. I blamed it on the constant head parking (it went idle after 10 minutes of unuse).
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#67Sysadmin 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 drives? No idea. Haven't used them in servers in a while. They seem more of a crapshoot to me. SSD's, thus far, are even more of a crapshoot and we don't use them in servers and only hesitantly in desktops/laptops and only Intel.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#68Backblaze may not know because they are "a company that keeps more than 25,000 disk drives spinning all the time". After 3-5 years, you'd better have a back-up of a drive you choose to spin down. Every drive I've lost (in the last 10-15 years and ignoring two failed controllers subject to a close lightning strike) failed to start back up when I had powered the machine off for maintenance.
I've bought perhaps 50 drives in the past 20 years, and maybe 10 of them died, the others mostly becoming obsolescent. I only started taking serious logs about 6 years ago. Drives have died for me both in 24/7 powered systems and through power cycles. Drives have reported intermittent failures for many months, but still lived for years without any actual data loss. The oldest drive I still have spinning is a 200G IDE…
The one thing to know about cheap consumer cloud backup solutions like CrashPlan and Backblaze is that they only have one copy of your data. So if their RAID array where your data is stored dies and cannot be rebuilt, it's all gone. You can Google for a few disaster stories about both companies.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#69Articles 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.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#70It 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.
The manufacturer has some good information about the statistical likelihood of your drive failing within a certain time period and tunes the warranty accordingly. They do not know exactly when your specific drive will fail as this would require some form of time travel.