For First Three Years, Consumer Hard Drives As Reliable As Enterprise Drives 270
nk497 writes "Consumer hard drives don't fail any more often than enterprise-grade hardware — despite the price difference. That's according to online storage firm Backblaze, which uses a mix of both types of drive. It studied its own hardware, finding consumer hard-drives had a failure rate of 4.2%, while enterprise-grade drives failed at a rate of 4.6%. CEO Gleb Budman noted: 'It turns out that the consumer drive failure rate does go up after three years, but all three of the first three years are pretty good,' he notes. 'We have no data on enterprise drives older than two years, so we don't know if they will also have an increase in failure rate. It could be that the vaunted reliability of enterprise drives kicks in after two years, but because we haven't seen any of that reliability in the first two years, I'm skeptical.'"
CSC (Score:3)
At my company all the hardware is managed by CSC. They retire severs in about 3 years...including the drives.
You're buying an extended warranty (Score:5, Insightful)
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And I bet that consumer drive did not come with a CE showing up in 2 to 4 hrs to replace the drive after the hardware called it in automatically.
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The enterprise drives don't either. If your support contract with somebody (who wouldn't be the drive manufacturer) covers that, that's not really related to the type of drive, but rather if you have a support contract or not.
Re:You're buying an extended warranty (Score:4, Informative)
Let's presume that consumer drives don't fail for 3 years, and enterprise drives don't fail for whatever their warranty period is (or at least neither suffers significant failure figures during those time periods). Let me then compare the price of a comparable consumer and enterprise drive on NewEgg:
Consumer drive: WD3001FAEX (3TB, 7200RPM, 64MB cache, 6gbit/s): $220, 2y warranty
Enterprise drive: WD3000FYYZ (3TB, 7200RPM, 64MB cache, 6gbit/s): $340, 5y warranty
Now, we know the data shows consumer drives are highly reliable for 3 years, after which they get reliable, so let's presume you replace at your own cost every 3 years. Enterprise drives are probably no more reliable, but replacements are free between years 3 and 5, so let's say you replace at your own cost every 5 years. You get:
Consumer drive, average cost per year: ~$73
Enterprise drive, average cost per year: ~$68
Not a huge difference there, and if both drives are really equally reliable, it doesn't really make much of a difference which you pick.
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Good analysis, with two issues:
1. Both of the specific drives you mentioned above have 5 yr warranties, so your specific example doesn't work for costs, but in general, your analysis is valid.
2. You don't address performance differences. WD doesn't specify seek times on these, so I can't compare them. But in general, "Enterprise" drives have faster seek and/or transfer rates. This may make the enterprise drive superior for certain environments.
One final difference, many/most "enterprise" drives have higher
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The warranty on the consumer one was listed as 2 years on NewEgg, where I got the prices from, not 5 years. In terms of seek times, they're both 7200RPM drives, so their seek times would be nearly identical as the 7200RPM rotation is the primary limiting factor there. And the amount of on-disk error correction is determined by if it's an AF drive or a 512b drive, not by if it's an Enterprise drive or not. Ironically, the specs show that the consumer drive I listed is an AF drive, while the enterprise drive
Re:You're buying an extended warranty (Score:4, Informative)
I got the warranty info directly from WD's site and spec sheets. RPM is NOT the primary factor in determining seek time, that only affects rotational latency, which is one of at least 4 components of access time, the other three being track seek time, head settling time, and head select time. Seek time is generally the largest of those, rotational latency second largest, and the others are minor by comparison.
Amount of ECC is not only dependent upon 512/4k (AF) drive, that's one factor, but most "enterprise" drives from most manufacturers have greater ECC and most use lower track densities to allow faster positioning (faster seek). For instance, compare the data sheets for the 7200RPM desktop [seagate.com] and Enterprise (Constellation ES) [seagate.com] drives from Seagate. Note the "enhanced error correction" and better "non-recoverable read error" rates (which are directly related to ECC recoverablity) on the ES (enterprise) drive, and that's comparing a 512b sector ES drive to a 4K/AF desktop drive.
As I said, you analysis was generally good, you just missed a the 3 items I noted.
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Good point. When the floods hit Thailand and drive prices increased by about 20%, most people cried, but when they almost simultaneously reduced warranties from 5 years to 1-2 years, effective prices nearly doubled and hardly anybody complained.
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Yeah, it probably is.
Cheaper to make them all the same, sell them based on the warranty/service than keep 2 production lines going.
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Uh, XP Home can't join and Active Directory domain. That's why businesses bought it, dipshit. NONE of the "home" versions of Windows can join a domain.
Re:You're buying an extended warranty (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because no business ever adds computers to a domain, has users log in via Remote Desktop, uses group policies or roaming profiles.
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> Yeah, because no business ever adds computers to a domain
Quite a few don't. Not every business is a Fortune 100 multi-national monstrosity. By definition, most are not.
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It's only a very small handful of businesses with more than 10 PCs/laptops I've seen without a domain (and none with more than 25 client machines), especially if they have any sort of central file or application server. To say that domains are limited to Fortune 100 companies is misguided at best.
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that and also the prestige of having ENTERPRISE hardware.
Kind of like how businesses pay extra for Windows XP Professional even though XP Home has all the features they ever use.
But with XP Pro, the volume control doesn't disappear on restart the way it does on 95 through XP Home no matter how many fricken boxes you have checked.
So obviously it's designed to prevent the delay of commerce by protecting cubical drones from the minor annoyances to which the mere home user is subjected.
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Your hot water heat is a closed-loop system. All of the minerals that will ever be in there were put in when it was filled. On the other hand, a water heater is constantly having new water flow through it. This water has minerals (calcium, whatever) in it. The heating makes these minerals settle out and line the bottom of the tank. Now there is a layer of stuff between the tank and the water where the flame (or element) heats the the tank, and that makes hot spots on the tank. Eventually the tank bur
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So why do water heaters leak at all. I have a 100 year old furnace in my house (Hot water, originally coal fired converted to natural gas). It doesn't leak so why should a 8 year old water heater?
Because it was made 100 years ago. Those furnaces were built like tanks. Gas and electric water heaters leak all the time, ask anyone (including me) who has come home to a flooded basement.
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Google proved this years ago (Score:4, Interesting)
Google already published many detailed reports on various issues surrounding the HDD business, proving that the money saved by buying cheaper hard-drives, and using them in data 'defending' situations (replicating data on multiple drives) made far more sense then using so-called 'enterprise' class equipment in complex, expensive configurations. Once again, to the surprise of no alpha, the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) principle wins out in engineering.
The buzz wordy, mock intellectual, synthetically complex world of 'enterprise' solutions is designed to appeal to the mind of the 'beta', a class of technocrat for whom rote-learning is everything. IT people are mostly of this class, so the 'paraphernalia' and 'jargon' make such people feel 'special'. The fundamentals of Computer Science fly right over the heads of most people involved in computer decision making.
It shames people to not even understand why the capitalist society works best with mass manufactured items, and that limited run items will always have significant compromises. Make more of an item, and it gets cheaper AND more reliable through necessity of efficiency.
But only a few days back, in some forum, people were dribbling in ecstasy because some fake enterprise HDD (RED series from Seagate?) was being 'discounted' to only 40% above the cost of the cheapest quality 3TB HDD. Many people gave EXPENSE as the primary reason for buying the vastly inferior Xbox One over the PS4 (in other words they were 'big' individuals because they could afford the more expensive console).
Not only that, (Score:2)
But consumer hard drives are so much cheaper that it's not really cost effective anymore to buy Enterprise drives. You may need to replace them more often, but as SATA are hot swappable and everyone is using some variation of RAID these days, one could argue that buying Enterprise drives is an unnecessary expense. In a down economy, that might be significant.
Re:Not only that, (Score:5, Informative)
Do you actually do Enterprise Storage? Because I know people who do.
At the really high end, the machines automatically call home and report a fault to the vendor. The vendor then dispatches someone to replace the faulty bit within the SLA.
In my experience, and from what I've been told by people who do this for a living, the Enterprise class drives come with the benefit of a warranty in which the manufacturer is contractually obligated to get you a replacement within a fixed amount of time.
Anyone doing real enterprise class storage for real mission critical things -- using commercial SATA drives is just not done unless it's cheap/bulk storage. Sure, you pay through the nose to the vendor for that kind of support, but you also have guaranteed service time and availability.
I just don't see evidence of people who do this at an enterprise scale cheaping out on disks for the important stuff.
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> At the really high end, the machines automatically call home and report a fault to the vendor.
Not everyone that does "Enterprise Storage" wants to pay for that kind of pampering. This is true in general and doesn't just apply to storage devices that you think no one else here has ever managed.
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I understand that ... but it all depends on how you define "enterprise".
Running a NAS box for 100 people versus running big huge storage for an actual 'enterprise' application spanning hundreds of terabytes (and being business critical to a multi-billion dollar company) is a different thing entirely.
In my experience, the people doing the latter pay for the 'pampering' because the outage is ridi
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> At the really high end, the machines automatically call home and report a fault to the vendor.
Not everyone that does "Enterprise Storage" wants to pay for that kind of pampering. This is true in general and doesn't just apply to storage devices that you think no one else here has ever managed.
Indeed. Moreover, there are other solutions, some included as a perk with commercial hardware, that do (in my experience) just as good a job at notifying in-house admins, who have much better business context, can make better decisions and respond much MUCH faster. You don't outsource storage support because it's more effective. You outsource storage support in the misguided belief that it's much cheaper [1], and that paying for someone else's generic process is somehow better than your own, more experie
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Do you actually do Enterprise Storage? Because I know people who do.
At the really high end, the machines automatically call home and report a fault to the vendor. The vendor then dispatches someone to replace the faulty bit within the SLA.
And if you know those people you have also heard the stories about how ugly things got when the new accounting team forgot to pay the service contract, and that one failed drive ended up costing A grand, and took 3 days to replace. (Because you couldn't just get one a Fry's and limp along for a few days...)
This is why the real big boys are going with commodity stuff.
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LOL, you know, I have never had an outage or problem like that from accountants forgetting to pay the bills.
Maybe your accountants suck? ;-)
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Never once have I heard of that happening. Do you also keep cheap offices empty somewhere in case your accountants 'forget' to pay the rent or taxes?
On the other hand, I have seen many cases of people deciding not to buy a service contract because it is 'too expensive', then crying like babies when they have a failure and the vendor says 'too bad'.
Re:Not only that, (Score:4, Interesting)
> Do you actually do Enterprise Storage? Because I know people who do.
> At the really high end, the machines automatically call home and report a fault to the vendor. The vendor then dispatches someone to replace the faulty bit within the SLA.
Yes, I deal directly with that, with Big Company and Really Big Company, and I have to say the process doesn't work very well, for many reasons that I won't enumerate here for keep-my-job reasons. In all honesty, we had better uptime and much faster response when we stocked our own spares and hired someone to walk through the machine room daily looking for yellow lights. Sorry, but that has been my experience. After outsourcing storage, the lag from warning light to replacement is significant, with many hilarious hijinks along the way. (My favorite being when they remotely updated the firmware during the same service call as disk replacement and bricked the device.) It's a great example of not getting what you pay for, except the ability to check off managerial line items.
Not like the 90's (Score:2)
Perhaps it's due to the smaller components or faster spindles creating more heat, but I rarely get a few years of service out of a single SATA drive before smartctl starts showing problems or a raid array tossing a drive. Seagate and OCZ have always been awesome about replacing the drive under warranty but still. Seems like those 400 meg IDE drives of yesteryear lasted decades before making any clicks-of-death.
Re:Not like the 90's (Score:4, Interesting)
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It seems to come in waves. Sometimes you get the old drives which work forever without issue, only being replaced because their capacity is pointless. Other times, your RAID arrays are constantly in degraded mode because a batch of HDDs are constantly dropping into prefail status, or just deciding to take a dirt nap.
Warranty isn't the only factor (Score:5, Informative)
All the newer shelves came preloaded with Coraid-approved drives. As I said, there's hundreds of drives involved here, a lot of SATA 1TB and 2TB and some SAS 600GB. I think out of the later drives, we've had two fail. Maybe three.
Asked about it, Coraid said, yes, the warranty is better on "Enterprise-class" or "RAID-class" drives, but also, the firmware is different. They claim that drives intended for the consumer / SOHO market spend a lot of time retrying marginal reads before declaring an unreadable sector and sparing it. They say that SAN-class drives limit the retry time, because the array controller handles it more efficiently, since it has the big-picture view.
The also say that the drives are optimized for close-quarters operation, all jammed together in an array, handling vibration and heat build-up slightly differently, and that they have minor differences to keep lubrication from migrating out of the spindle bearing under continuous operation. I don't know but I imagine loss of spindle bearing lube would add vibration and make any but the best reads more marginal.
I don't know for sure, but we've spent a great deal of US dollars on their products and our experience has borne out the fact that there's a definite difference in arrays.
As for corporate desktop and/or server use, well, I don't really know. Our servers that have one to four drives were mostly shipped with those drives, so we didn't choose them. I can't tell you if they are enterprise class drives, but I imagine they are, based on the replacement costs. And I know about what some of those costs are, or anyhow I know they were way more than I personally pay for drives for home desktop and server use. I know that because occasionally they fail, and I have to buy new ones.
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they have minor differences to keep lubrication from migrating out of the spindle bearing under continuous operation. I don't know but I imagine loss of spindle bearing lube
Yeah? Where does the lube leak to? If it were into platter space, the drive would instantly die. If it were outside of the drive, we'd see it.
The Coraid folks seem to know their game, so I'm curious how they think this failure mode works.
Used to design HDD's (Score:5, Informative)
No difference between enterprise and home HDD's that I know of.
As for what "hammering and heavy use " of a drive is?
The biggest killer of HDD's is something called the CSS test cycle.
CSS = Contact Start Stop where the drive is booted up, spun up, and then shut down repetitively.
Generally, a HDD sitting there spinning away is not what kill them off,
however turning them on-off-on-off a lot is the most abusive thing that you can do.
I still think WD makes the best quality out there, but that's just my opinion.
just my 0.02 worth...
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>> I still think WD makes the best quality out there, but that's just my opinion.
Not in my experience. Some while ago I've had several Raptor (10k RPM) drives, they cost a whole lot for their capacity mostly because of their performance, but I also seem to remember they were meant to be enterprise quality.
None of them lasted more than a year or so. One went down in like 3 months.
Repeat as necessary (Score:2)
I wonder how many more slashdot stories will be based upon the same Backblaze story of the "first of its kind" (ignoring Google's older paper) story on hard drive longevity, that doesn't name names?
There could be so much more (Score:2)
That's an unfair scenario. There could be many quality differences between enterprise and consumer drives that simply don't come up in their environment. I know when I make consumer and enterprise-grade objects, of course the consumer-grade objects work -- I don't build carp -- but the enterprise-grade work better. For many values of better. Most often, that better includes things like a wider temperature range, dirtier air, and more frequent and rougher shipping. Even my packaging is wildly different
Useless (Score:3)
Until we see some names, those studies are useless...
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Re:But but but (Score:5, Funny)
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Better than being Reliant SSDs. I hear they can be accessed remote with prefix code 16309.
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IMO a good bulk storage array uses spinning rust, with optional SSD caching depending on performance requirements (RAM caching might be good enough depending on use case).
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Absolutely; for large, fast (and short-term) storage we use servers with 6 fast disks in RAID 0, and when that's not enough we use big RAM disks. SSD's have been played with (without any problems) but don't seem to add anything to our particular (admittedly unusual) set-up.
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On a good system a single SSD will easily outperform even 6 15k RPM fast disks. I have noticed however that "hardware" RAID controllers (even the expensive 20k external ones) don't have the throughput to handle 6 SSD's (they're powered by like RISC/ARM cores between 250 and 800MHz with DDR2 RAM, simply doesn't have enough IOPS). Direct-attached (using simple SAS controllers and doing it all in software) goes a lot faster.
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"...a good bulk storage array uses spinning rust,..."
I don't allow rust in my storage arrays. Aluminum, magnesium, and glass don't rust.
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Everybody who has anything more than a trivial amount of storage.
I don't see giant NetApp filers holding hundreds of terabytes being replaced with SSDs any time soon.
SSDs have their uses, but they're nowhere near cheap enough to replace systems with massive amounts of storage or that rely on RAID.
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They're getting really close for primary storage and being used in RAID arrays..
300GB 15k RPM SAS is about $180-$200. An Intel DC S3500 Series SSD (300GB) is around $390. So the price difference of the SSD vs the spinning rust is only about 2x now. And you will probably gain 25x IOPS over that spinning rust.
Bulk storage using 7200 RPM drives is still the domain of spi
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Re:Common knowledge (Score:5, Interesting)
What? There's absolutely difference between 87 octane and 92+ octane.
For 99% of cars, there is no difference. Unless a car is specifically designed to use a higher compression ratio, there is no benefit whatsoever to a higher octane rating. Besides, you are assuming that the premium gas actually has a higher octane rating. Years ago, it actually cost more to make high octane gas. Today the octane rating can be tweaked with cheap additives. So it is common to just make it all 92, then just use one tanker truck to make the delivery and just fill all the tanks with identical gas.
Re:Common knowledge (Score:5, Informative)
Also FYI the octane requirement can be related to timing advance, where a lower-compression turbocharged engine with more advanced timing would need higher octane gas to make longer burns from each spark (higher octane gas burns longer than lower octane gas). The earlier spark sets off a longer-burn time of gas timed to the timing, needing the longer-burn ability of the 92+ octane. An old simple truck with 0 BDC timing would be happy with 87 octane, where a newer engine with 15 BDC timing advance would be better with 92+ octane.
Fuck this is way off topic from hard drives, sorry. Just needed to fill in some missing info.
As for hard drives, the more, the better. RAID is for safety now, and SSD's are for speed where we used to have RAID-0. ETC
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Source on the tanker claim?
Also FYI the octane requirement can be related to timing advance, where a lower-compression turbocharged engine with more advanced timing would need higher octane gas to make longer burns from each spark (higher octane gas burns longer than lower octane gas). The earlier spark sets off a longer-burn time of gas timed to the timing, needing the longer-burn ability of the 92+ octane. An old simple truck with 0 BDC timing would be happy with 87 octane, where a newer engine with 15 BDC timing advance would be better with 92+ octane.
While you are correct your numbers are off.. i haven't seen a car thats less than 10 years old with timing at 0 BDC or retard.. a naturally aspirated 90's miata runs 36 advance, and you can safely take that to 39 advance on 93oct and into the low 40's with 100oct
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At my gas station the mid-grade is also 10% Ethanol. I don't think you can get there just by mixing regular and premium...
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> AvGas is typically only in the 105-120 range, and it's used in turbine engines with compression levels that would reduce a car's ICE to shrapnel.
No. Standard avgas is 100LL (100 Octane, low lead). It's just like gasoline from the auto pumps, but the octane level is higher and there's still some lead in it, where the auto industry is fully unleaded. (There are some aircraft that can handle lower-octane mogas, but they're rare.)
Turbine engines typically use Jet-A, which is a diesel-like, kerosene based f
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All correct.
Everything else being equal, higher compression engines have higher efficiency and higher compression requires higher octane gas. There is an efficiency / cost tradeoff with compression and reuqired octane that resulted in 87 being most common, but 92 octane being used in cars, and 100 octane being standard for almost all aircraft piston engines.
Turbines and diesels use similar (often identical) fuels that are completely different from gasoline. Diesels are high compression, but rely on the fue
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For some vehicles, a tuner can have a setting where one needs 92 octane... but the MPG gains are significant enough to offset the higher cost for premium.
However, this is definitely a YMMV item in the literal sense.
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320 miles / 15 gallons = 21.33 MPG
250 miles / 15 gallons = 16.67 MPG
320 - 250 = a 70 mile difference in performance.
At 16.67 MPG, 70 miles equates to about 4.2 extra gallons needed to reach 320 miles. So for that person, using premium is like having an extra 4.2 gallons in his tank.
In my state, the best prices I could find for 87 and 92 gas were:
$2.83 for 87 and $3.11 for 92
$2.83 * 19.2 = $54.34
$3.11 * 15.0 = $46.65
So for every 320 miles he drives, he is basi
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Let's assume a 10 gallon tank, and $1/gal for 87 and $1.20/gal for 92 (typical price difference in the US). It takes $10 to fill up on 87, $12 on 92. $10 / 250 miles = $0.04 per mile. $12 / 320 miles = $0.0375 per mile. So yes, there is a cost savings, though, very small per mile. You'll typically see some wear and tear (read: maintenance) savings on the engine as well, since there should be less build-up, etc. due to the higher octane.
Of course, that all assume the GP's numbers are true.
Well we know that your numbers are not. Good luck finding premium gas at $.20 higher than regular. It's usually more like $.30 - $.40 higher, at least.
Re: Common knowledge (Score:5, Informative)
Here in Australia, 92 is the standard fuel and 97 is the premium. I can't imagine putting 87 in my car...
Australia displays the "Research Octane Number" on the pumps, while the US diplays the "Anti-Knock Index", which is:
((Research Octane Number) + (Motor Octane Number)) / 2
Since MON is often 8-10 points lower for the same fuel, this results in 4-5 points lower on the pump display in the US.
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Depends entirely on your car.
For many cars, premium/high octane gas does very little. For higher-end cars and sports cars, it can make a huge difference.
And then on the really high-end there's a reason they make racing fuel (118 octane), because it makes a huge difference for some things.
A 1996 Buick, not so much. A Porsche or something like that, I bet it makes a huge difference -- both in performance and engine longev
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Don't believe you. You know that there is less energy in a gallon of higher-octane fuel than a gallon of lower-octane fuel, right? Higher efficiency and power through increased compression ratio and more advanced timing provides a net benefit to cars that require higher-octane fuel, but no advantage to cars that are not tuned to use the higher-octane fuel.
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Doesn't work like that. Knock sensor outputs are used to retard timing. Maximum advance is determined in advance for the engine with recommended fuel. Otherwise a failed knock sensor could quickly result in a destroyed engine.
Perhaps if OP's engine was suffering from excessive knock due to a fault (excessive carbon build-up, incorrect timing, etc.) then higher octane fuel would make a difference.
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No it doesn't. You utterly fail to understand what the octane rating means. The engine in your saturn would in no way benefit from the higher octane rating. It could in fact run without noticing a problem with a significantly lower octane rating. Octane ratings matter in high compression engines or turbo/supercharged engines, not in econobox.
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Even my old 4-banger (gutless) 1997 Saturn SL1 sees a difference in pickup between 87 and 89 octane fuels when at highway speeds.
You are deluding yourself. Unless your car uses high or variable compression (it doesn't), there is no benefit whatsoever to higher octane gasoline.
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enterprise drives have this thing called a warranty
i send a log to HP, and within 4 hours i have a new drive delivered to me. and they all have NCQ while most consumer drives dont
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That and to be fare, Enterprise drives may have a much higher level of usage then personal drives.
Re:Common knowledge (Score:4, Insightful)
Consumer drives have this thing called being half the price, keep one spare, what the heck if it breaks go out and buy a new one, in 1 a hour, still faster than 4 hours. What kind of enterprise organization wouldn't have a few hard drives spare just in case a few failed. Send the old one back to replaced, in their own good time.
I don't see why you would have to pay 100% markup for what is basically insurance, for the manufactures defects.
Sort of like airline tickets that you can reschedule, more than 2x the price and still subject to availability (last time my company bought one), just buy the non refundable ticket, if your plans change then buy another one, the average cost is going to be less, unless you change your plans a lot, perhaps you need better planning? You also have travel insurance for such things which is not the cost of the plane ticket, and covers other things too.
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Consumer drives have this thing called being half the price, keep one spare, what the heck if it breaks go out and buy a new one, in 1 a hour, still faster than 4 hours. What kind of enterprise organization wouldn't have a few hard drives spare just in case a few failed.
The Fortune-sized one I used to work at, alas. And the RAID drives would always blow out while I was on vacation. Then before I got back, another RAID drive would blow, breaking the array. And in-house inventory wouldn't have any spares and the drive in question was no longer available from approved suppliers.
We weren't just paying for the 7-year warranty, however. We were also paying for the high-performance SCSI interfaces. These systems were doing mainframe-grade work. We even had mainframe tape readers.
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If you think SSDs fail because a part "fails" you lack understanding of how they work.
SSDs have a property called "write endurance" - their data cells are rated to a specific number of writes. Every time you write, you consume some of the remaining write capacity of the drive. It works like a salt shaker: works find until you run out of salt.
Enterprise drives can have dozens to hundreds of times the write endurance of a consumer drive. For example, the Intel SSDs we use are rated to withstand 100% of the d
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once or twice i've had drives fail within a day or two of each other in the same RAID5 array. having a replacement on site FAST can be the difference between drinking beer at night or losing tens of millions of $$$ of data, spending hours restoring it and losing business in the mean time
that 6TB database i have might take 2 days to restore and in the meantime customers won't be able to access their data
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you missed the point spare drive cheaper & fas (Score:3)
I think you missed his point. With the money you save, buy a spare drive.
6 drives with enterprise warranty: $1800, 12 hour replacement
7 drives with consumer warranty: $1300, instant replacement
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the HP drives are guaranteed to work in our HP servers with RAID controllers. no spending weeks doing money work figuring out why something doesn't work
we call in and stuff is replaced since everything is HP. no blame game saying its the other manufacturer's fault
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Premium gasoline is different from regular, and some cars do require it to keep working properly. That many people improperly think it's worth the price in their 15 year old Civic isn't the fault of the people selling the gas. That's like saying SSDs aren't worth the money just because some idiot stuck it in a budget system running Vista on a Pentium II.
Personally, we get enterprise grade drives at work for performance and support reasons more than reliability. As long as the RAID is configured properly, sw
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Premium gasoline is different from regular, and some cars do require it to keep working properly. That many people improperly think it's worth the price in their 15 year old Civic isn't the fault of the people selling the gas. That's like saying SSDs aren't worth the money just because some idiot stuck it in a budget system running Vista on a Pentium II.
Personally, we get enterprise grade drives at work for performance and support reasons more than reliability. As long as the RAID is configured properly, swapping out dead drives doesn't even rank "nuisance" on my list of common tasks.
Anyone trying to run Vista on a Pentium II, even without a "capacitor plague" bedeviled motherboard, needs all the help they can get.
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Perhaps you are missing this part:
Enterprise drives do have one advantage: longer warranties. That’s a benefit only if the higher price you pay for the longer warranty is less that what you expect to spend on replacing the drive.
Businesses want longer warranties especially these days as computers are being used longer and longer before being replaced. Realistically the first part to fail on a PC will be the hard drive.
Re:Common knowledge (Score:5, Funny)
"Realistically the first part to fail on a PC will be the hard drive."
Only because the user isn't technically part of the PC.
Power supply (Score:2)
Given the cheap PSU's I've seen in a lot of boxes (and the rate of failure), I'd say in many cases that it's a contest between the drives and the PSU, especially when you get to areas with flakey power.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps you are missing this part:
Enterprise drives do have one advantage: longer warranties...
Businesses want longer warranties especially these days ...
The warranties are just more evidence that "enterprise drives" are a scam. Warranties are almost never worth the price you pay for them. If they were, few companies would be foolish enough to offer them.
Re: (Score:2)
The warranties are just more evidence that "enterprise drives" are a scam. Warranties are almost never worth the price you pay for them. If they were, few companies would be foolish enough to offer them.
Translation: I personally have never benefitted from a warranty so they are useless to everyone.
At the many IT departments I have worked, warranties were used extensively. From little things like memory to whole motherboards were replaced without hassle. The only major company I know that uses consumer grade HDs in volume is probably Google and that is only because they have designed their server infrastructure to use massively identical and disposable hardware.
Re:Common knowledge (Score:4, Interesting)
The only major company I know that uses consumer grade HDs in volume is probably Google
What qualifies as "major"? :-) This article is about Backblaze, we have 25,000 consumer hard drives, are we "major"?
Re:Common knowledge (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you saying that the enterprise drives last longer?
I didn't say that.
Or just that they are replaced for free when they die at the same or higher rates? If you want to save money, I think the answer is *NOT* buy the warranty (so buy consumer drives) because the warranty costs more than just replacing the failed drives?
If your company wants to do that, then do it. But I would think that is a hard sell to the IT directors who want service and replacement parts quickly. Here's the scenario:
1. HD fails
2. Log ticket with HD company and get replacement drive with little cost
or
2. Put in a purchase order for a new drive.
At some companies, buying a new drive outright is more troublesome/bureaucratic than getting a replacement drive.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
While consumer drives overall might not have a significantly higher failure rate than enterprise ones, I can think of a few differences:
a) consumer drives are nearly always 7200rpm for normal models, 5400rpm for green or laptop models which directly influences the number of small random disk operations that can be performed per second and the overall maximum throughput. Enterprise drives typically range from 18000rpm at the very high end to 7200rpm at the absolutely lowest end, with 10K rpm probably the mo
Re: (Score:2)
Besides that premium gasoline can be required for some high end cars, "enterprise" drives usually have SAS connectors which are required in a lot of environments (eg. multi-host systems).
Also most enterprise drives have different performance characteristics - for example if a drive read or write fails on a sector, a desktop drive will time out and retry for 10-20 times or more, an enterprise drive will return after 2 or 3 times and report it as unreadable which can make a great difference in performance (wa
Re: (Score:2)
"a laptop bouncing around in a purse"
And I thought my fiancee's purse was huge, but even she can't fit her laptop in with enough room for it to bounce.
Re:Common knowledge (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Disclaimer: Backblaze engineer here. I don't think all "commercial storage systems" get exactly the same "hammering". Some commercial systems are used to store data quietly for a long time (let's say online backup or shutterfly storage of photos), some commercial systems are hammered constantly (google's homepage search). I reject the concept that "enterprise" or "commercial" is a thing. You MUST look at the specific application. Some consumers use their hard drives quite a bit, some don't. Some corporations are hammering away at their drives, some are not.
Why is this not +5 already? He is exactly right in that all workloads do not fit neatly into the containers the marketing people seem to think they do.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, no kidding. Back in my younger and less persuasive days, we were on a project where we were forced by PHBs to use consumer drives in an enterprise system (storing and retreiving syslog data in a VERY busy environment). We were literally blowing them out every three months or so until the Powers That Be finally relented and let us put in proper storage (back then that also meant shelling out for a pricy SCSI HBA). I think that the gap has closed somewhat since then, and there are also some interesting
Re: (Score:2)
from the article they are using consumer, and enterprise dives for the same purpose, so comparison is not pointless at all.
Re: (Score:3)
No, from TFA:
, so the comparison is indeed pointless (more accurately, it's baseless).
Re: (Score:2)
"Enterprise" grade drives are often faster, having better processors and more cache
The cache is whatever is written on the drive, so a "Enterprise" drive with 32 MB of cache has less than a "Consumer" drive with 64 MB. I don't know what the heck you think the word "Enterprise" gets you in this case?
drive manufacturers have to listen to server and storage array manufacturers and meet their requirements
Different storage arrays have different requirements, I hate the idea that people think "Enterprise" magically got all the tradeoffs correct. For example, low power and high responsiveness are BOTH valid goals but probably are at odds. Some Enterprises (like Backblaze and Shutterfly) care de
Re:Common knowledge (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't use a consumer drive in a RAID array if that drive will spend 90 seconds trying to recover a normal read error before sparing the sector out. TLER means "give up almost immediately" on media errors.
Yes, it's a bit of a scam that you have to buy a high-end drive to get TLER, since it's just a flag in the firmware, but it's still critical ro RAID.
Re: (Score:2)
You can't use a consumer drive in a RAID array if that drive will spend 90 seconds trying to recover a normal read error before sparing the sector out. TLER means "give up almost immediately" on media errors.
That's only for crummy RAID controllers with no memory to speak of. Use ZFS with simple host adapters - you'll be happier and save a bunch of money.
SAS IDENTIFY is the only useful feature missing from SATA. Well, full duplex too, but you better be buying $$$ SSD's if you have those concerns, so SAS vs
Re:Common knowledge (Score:4, Insightful)
What the heck? The error retry and sector sparing are within the drive itself. ZFS doesn't even see this. What ZFS can see is a drive not responding for 90 seconds after a write command, and ZFS or the driver below the ZFS level does not like this. There is real danger of multiple drives being kicked out of the storage pool quickly and the whole pool failing, when proper drive behavior lets the pool continue undegraded even in the face of bad sectoirs on multiple disks.
There are plenty of consumer drives that can be set to the same TLER (time limited error control) behavior as enterprise drives, though.
Right on the money about using ZFS, though. I will never understand losers using old fashioned expensive caching RAID controllers when ZFS on dumb SATA/SAS ports is far superior in every way. Many or most of them are Windows losers, of course.
Re: (Score:3)
very common for multiple drives in an array to fail within a short time window, due to shared environmental problems
Exactly. We had one interesting incident where in the middle of the night, 3 pods right next to each other in a rack all went berserk and all their RAID fell apart. That's 135 drives all at once (3 pods each with 45 hard drives). We reassembled them all, and the VERY NEXT NIGHT at the same time it happened again. We moved all three servers to different ends of the datacenter -> and finally figured out which server was causing the problems. The fan bearings on a fan were going bad, and when the fan c