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Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

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Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#81

Post by simcop2387 »

level wrote: post #13
simcop2387 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not going to be skewed. HGST disks are usually more expensive, so that limits the quantity that they buy. The seagate disks are usually cheaper but have a slightly higher (except when it's a brand new line) failure rate. When filling out a single server I go with the HGST disks because the premium price and quality means fewer failures, but it's more cost effective to go for lots of seagate disks when you hav…

I built a server a few years ago, and I determined it was more cost effective for a drive to fail than to use HGST. It would be more inconvenient, but having a drive fail on a home server with only 6 drives didn't seem very likely anyway.

There's also the cost of the time it takes you to replace the drive, get it replaced under warranty, etc. that takes a part of the cost of everything too. I decided that the (at the time) marginal cost of $20/disk was worth my time in likely not having to deal with it.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#83

Post by fludlight »

VectorLock wrote: post #43
simcop2387 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not going to be skewed. HGST disks are usually more expensive, so that limits the quantity that they buy. The seagate disks are usually cheaper but have a slightly higher (except when it's a brand new line) failure rate. When filling out a single server I go with the HGST disks because the premium price and quality means fewer failures, but it's more cost effective to go for lots of seagate disks when you hav…

This makes me curious of where the cost/benefit point is between these brands of drives. Do they buy enough that the reduced cost for higher failure rate outweighs the expense of buying more expensive drives?

It's only partially a question of quantity.

The larger factor is the amount of labor involved in dealing with a bad drive.

Their (large) operation seems automated so I assume if they have a single drive failure in machine #1234 (which has 50+ drives) they have an automated way of switching off said drive. Then they leave it there until the entire rack is replaced many years later.

Other operations have to send a human to manually replace every single failed drive as soon as it fails, which is very expensive as a % of the cost of the bare drive.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#84

Post by simcop2387 »

VectorLock wrote: post #43
simcop2387 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not going to be skewed. HGST disks are usually more expensive, so that limits the quantity that they buy. The seagate disks are usually cheaper but have a slightly higher (except when it's a brand new line) failure rate. When filling out a single server I go with the HGST disks because the premium price and quality means fewer failures, but it's more cost effective to go for lots of seagate disks when you hav…

This makes me curious of where the cost/benefit point is between these brands of drives. Do they buy enough that the reduced cost for higher failure rate outweighs the expense of buying more expensive drives?

They buy enough drives that there's another point of data that's needed for them. Availability of the disks. If they need to expand a few 10s of petabytes they may only be able to get enough disks from one group regardless of reliability concerns.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#85

Post by wmf »

mikece wrote: post #76

While I've heard lots of great things about the Backblaze reports, I've noticed in comments on NewEgg, Amazon, etc that the SKUs mentioned in the report frequently aren't available anymore. I've never had problems with WD Red drives though I don't purchase them all from the same vendor at the same time to make sure I get drives from different lots in case of a lot defect.

By the time you have accurate reliability data on any equipment it's obsolete. Maybe this will change with the slowdown of Moore's Law/Kryder's Law.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#86

Post by rolleiflex »

akulbe wrote: post #77
brianwski wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased. :-) > If you have terabytes to back up, are there still any backup services left that'll let you ship them a drive for a faster initial backup? Backblaze offers a "Backblaze Rapid Ingest Fireball" to allow you to ship us 60 TBytes of data on an appliance. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/introducing-backblazes-rapid-... If you only have 2 - 10 TBytes, I suggest you get a f…

Hi Brian, Thank you for reaching out. I love it when company folks will get into the conversation on HN. As far as connection, I've got 300/300 from Frontier. It's good, and I can help out my friends. But more questions below... I had been using CrashPlan for years. Converted to their business plan when they decided to ditch the Consumer stuff. My confidence in their viability/user experience has eroded. I have perso…

Same here, another burned ex-Crashplan customer. My setup was like a few TBs of personal data, and a few GBs each of family from 7-8 different computers (I was on the family plan). Not surprisingly, it's a lot easier to find a replacement for my own data than the family's, and they are under higher risk. Per computer pricing is a terrible deal for that — I'd love to have a per computer plan, plus quota of x Gb per month for N amount of computers that I can distribute as I wish.

Though what I probably want is just S3... Maybe I should just build it and sell that.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#88

Post by superhuzza »

e40 wrote: post #61
krob wrote: post #3

HGST look like the best, but they don't have the quantities of the Seagate, makes me wonder if these numbers are skewed :/

Anyone have a good source of HGST drives? On Amazon, it used to be you could only get them from resellers and some comments complained about getting used drives. I basically stopped buying HDs from Amazon from resellers. EDIT: Example: THEY ONLY WAY YOU CAN VERIFY THAT YOU DID INDEED RECEIVE THE FULL 5 YEAR HGST WARRANTY IS YOU MUST CALL HGST TECHNICAL SERVICE, GIVE THEM THE SERIAL NUMBER AND ASK IF THE DRIVE IS A NO…

Agreed. I only buy storage for personal use, but I've learned to avoid Amazon entirely. There are just way too many reports of fake or repackaged HDDs, SSDs, SD cards etc.

I can generally get the same or relatively comparable prices at local computer stores that I trust significantly more than Amazon.

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#89

Post by superhuzza »

brianwski wrote: post #50
jl6 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be wary of freeloading the upload bandwidth on a pipe that belongs to someone else.

I wouldn't advocate for breaking any laws or stealing anything that doesn't belong to you, but a whole lot of places have "totally unused bandwidth" and it won't hurt them at all financially for you to use 1/4 of their unused capacity. Funny story: I'm kind of unusual that I run an open WiFi hotspot in my home, because I have plenty of unused bandwidth and guests in my house and even neighbors are welcome to borrow s…

tragedy_of_the_commons.torrent

Re: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018

#90

Post by fpgaminer »

bluedino wrote: post #68
fpgaminer wrote: post #54

Tangentially related. Whenever I get a new drive, I always do a "burn-in". A program writes data to the whole drive and then reads it back (reproducible random data). Is there any real justification for doing this kind of test on a new drive? Doing it takes quite awhile, so I've been wondering lately if it's even worth it. I've never found anything with it.

In one of their first blog posts about the pods they stated that they saw 'high infant mortality' in drives so they would burn-in each pod for a few days before writing any customer data to one.

Thank you. Found the post: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/alas-poor-stephen-is-dead/

They have another good idea in there: recording the SMART data before and after the test. Their theory is that even if SMART attributes are still OK after the test, looking for a trend in the attributes may point to eventual failure later. Nice.

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