Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How long do disk drives last?

blog.backblaze.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 162 posts

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#91

Post by wmf »

nether wrote: post #74

Does ANYONE know what hard drives Google, Facebook, and Dropbox use at their datacenters? This 2006 article says Google buys Seagate: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2006/11/16/seagate-ceo-google-we... .

There are only three disk vendors now and I would assume that large customers buy from at least two of them. But knowing this information won't help you, because a new model from company X may be a dud even if the company's previous models were reliable. By the time any model has enough accumulated reliability data that you can tell whether it's reliable or not it's obsolete and you don't want to buy it.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#92

Post by baruch »

rsync wrote: post #80
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #67

Sysadmin 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…

Agreed RE: SSD drives ... It is very disappointing how flaky and unreliable SSD devices have been when their promise was just the opposite, due to lack of moving parts. Back in 1999/2000 I had a habit of building some personal as well as commercial servers in datacenters with compact flash parts (plain old consumer CF drives) as boot devices with the goal of fault tolerance in mind. There was a price to be paid in th…

They get the same writes but not the same reads, so depending on the bug source it may not hit both at the same time. The read pattern itself may affect the way the writes are performed to the flash (delaying or speeding up writes pending for commit) that it may have a butterfly effect on the rest of the behavior and removing the disks from being in sync with regard to firmware bugs.

If you'd still follow up on your idea of using a read-only root like you did with CF cards and figured a safe place for the logs you could still use the SSDs in the same mode. Why not go that route?

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#93

Post by baruch »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #67

Sysadmin 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…

I've used mostly 7200rpm SATA and Nearline-SAS and they are mostly fine in fact, didn't play enough with higher rpm SAS yet but so far I don't see a big difference between them and the 7200 NL-SAS drives.

I'd echo the sentiment seen elsewhere in the comments about Seagate drives vs. Hitachi drives. Both for SATA and NL-SAS. Hitachi 1TB were rock solid compared to Seagate.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#94

Post by rsync »

baruch wrote: post #92
rsync wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed RE: SSD drives ... It is very disappointing how flaky and unreliable SSD devices have been when their promise was just the opposite, due to lack of moving parts. Back in 1999/2000 I had a habit of building some personal as well as commercial servers in datacenters with compact flash parts (plain old consumer CF drives) as boot devices with the goal of fault tolerance in mind. There was a price to be paid in th…

They get the same writes but not the same reads, so depending on the bug source it may not hit both at the same time. The read pattern itself may affect the way the writes are performed to the flash (delaying or speeding up writes pending for commit) that it may have a butterfly effect on the rest of the behavior and removing the disks from being in sync with regard to firmware bugs. If you'd still follow up on your…

Yes, depending on the bug source. But the bug source might be related to reads. Nobody knows. Splitting the risk across two different vendors / implementations seems to be good insurance.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#95

Post by TrainedMonkey »

wazoox wrote: post #82

There are extremely large difference in reliability between different drives makes and models. Here are a couple of numbers (we're building storage servers, running 24/24 in various environments): * my company installed about 4500 Seagate Barracuda ES2 (500 GB, 750 GB and mostly 1TB) between 2008 and 2010. These drives are utter crap, in 5 years we got about 1500 failures, much worse than the previous generation (250…

I remember seeing somewhere that failure rates correspond strongly with number of platters (Something along the lines that doubling platters doubles chance of failure within 3 years).

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#96

Post by baruch »

dmourati wrote: post #88

Ugh. Backblaze is one of those companies with an extraordinarily poor design that they flout and "open source" as if anyone would follow their lead. Take a look at the physical design of their system and combine that with the published data. Consider that to remove any harddrive from their setup requires physically removing a 4u rackmount storage pod from the rack. http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-…

They do a different tradeoff here. There is no need for a hardware raid if performance is not your main concern (and even if it is hardware raid is no panacea), if they save everything to disk before acknowledging it they don't need a battery and I'm not sure what you refer to as cap.

Their hardware design is specifically geared towards their use-case and I applaud them for knowing how to optimize for their use-case. I wouldn't use it for mine but only because it's not a good fit.

They can open-source the hardware because the real secret sauce is the software and the hardware open sourcing gives them a nice edge in marketing.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#97

Post by baruch »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #40

Extremely useful info here. Most of my HDs have been running for years and still work fine, but you go online, and all you read about is that HDs are horrendously unreliable and all fail after a year or two. (manufacturer propaganda, anyone?) The optical drives I've had, on the other hand, are actually unreliable. They all seem to break down after about four years, and I don't use them all that often!

Your disks are going fine, do you feel the urge to report about it in the reviews on amazon or newegg or where you bought it from?

There is an inherent bias in the reviews. Which makes the backblaze report so interesting, they have less of a bias though they do not report actual disk vendors and models to really draw direct inference only the general trend.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#98

Post by baruch »

rsync wrote: post #94
baruch wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get the same writes but not the same reads, so depending on the bug source it may not hit both at the same time. The read pattern itself may affect the way the writes are performed to the flash (delaying or speeding up writes pending for commit) that it may have a butterfly effect on the rest of the behavior and removing the disks from being in sync with regard to firmware bugs. If you'd still follow up on your…

Yes, depending on the bug source. But the bug source might be related to reads. Nobody knows. Splitting the risk across two different vendors / implementations seems to be good insurance.

I mostly handle server appliances and the read-only boot disk is bread-and-butter for anything I do. Bonus points for using initramfs and never hitting the boot disk after the initial boot is completed.

But if you stick to boot SSDs that are read and written to using different makes sounds like a good strategy.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#99

Post by stormbrew »

lgeek wrote: post #43
cmer wrote: post #36

Anybody knows how long floppy disks, diskettes and their respective drives last? Odd question, but I've always been wondering. These things just seem to hast forever.

According to this article[0], the data from old floppy disks is pretty much gone. [0] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191

I recently went through all my old 3.5" floppies I could find and most of them were still quite readable. This seems like a bit of hysteria to me. I didn't preserve as many of my 5.25" floppies, but I also don't have a drive for them. My 3.5" drive is an old USB one that came from a Toshiba laptop circa 2000. It was in a drive bay that was replaceable with a cdrom drive.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#100

Post by pedrocr »

jws wrote: post #58
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.

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…

I assume you mean Start_Stop_Count. A quick check on two servers, each with 4 green drives in RAID6 and RAID5 setups tells me this hasn't been a problem. Both have Start_Stop_Count's below 100 (on the order of the number of boots the servers have had). I don't see any other number that could be the head park.

The number I have been finding to be high is Hardware_ECC_Recovered (values between 1036555546 and 2699460003). Not sure if that's normal. I've also had two 1.5TB drives now end up with unrecoverable sectors. RAID recovers from that just fine but I've been replacing them as it keeps reoccurring and is supposed to be a signal of failing disks. These 1.5TB drives are a 3+´years old and I've been thrashing them a bit lately. I'd have expected them to last longer though.

Post reply on HN