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.'"
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.
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).
Re:Not like the 90's (Score:4, Interesting)
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: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.