Backblaze's 6 TB Hard Drive Face-Off 173
Esra Erimez writes: Backblaze is transitioning from using 4 TB hard drives to 6 TB hard drives in the Storage Pods they will be deploying over the coming months. With over 10,000 hard drives, the choice of which 6TB hard drive to use is critical. They deployed 45 and tested Western Digital (WD60EFRX) and Seagate (STBD6000100) hard drives into two pods that were identical in design and configuration except for the hard drives used.
Long story short (ad-less) (Score:5, Informative)
- Running reliability (3 months) – No failures
- SMART Stats (3 months) – No error conditions recorded for the 5 stats that we utilize.
- Hard Drive Cost – about the same.
- Energy Use – The Seagate drives were 7200 rpm and used slightly more electricity than the Western Digital drives which were 5400 rpm. This small difference adds up when you place 45 drives in a Storage Pod and then stack 10 Storage Pods in a cabinet.
- Loading speed – Edge to Western Digital, by a little over 1 TB per day on average.
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Re:Long story short (ad-less) (Score:5, Informative)
That didn't really make sense to me that the 5400 RPM drive beat out the 7200 RPM drive, so I did a bit of research.
The WD drives were the WD60EFRX. It's a 5-platter 6TB drive [anandtech.com], or 1.2 TB/platter. It has 64MB cache.
The Seagate drives were the STBD6000100. It's a 6-platter drive [techradar.com], or 1 TB/platter. It has 128MB cache. Googling for it brings up contradictory information, listing it as both 7200 RPM and 5900 RPM. (Note: It's pathetic that Seagate doesn't list basic information like RPM on their website.)
So apparently the higher areal density on the WD (meaning more data can be written per rotation, and shorter r/w head strokes to move to a given number of cylinder tracks) is enough to overcome its RPM disadvantage. Given the results, it's likely the Seagate STBD6000100 is 5900 RPM drive, as 7200/5400 = 1.33 which would've exceeded the WD's higher areal density.
I'd caution though that Backblaze's application seems to be a highly sequential task. Peak transfer rates were over 7 TB/day, which is more than 80 MB/s. Given the larger cache and higher RPM (whether 5900 or 7200), I'd expect the Seagate drive to perform better under random read/writes.
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- Energy Use – The Seagate drives were 7200 rpm and used slightly more electricity than the Western Digital drives which were 5400 rpm. This small difference adds up when you place 45 drives in a Storage Pod and then stack 10 Storage Pods in a cabinet.
This makes me wonder if I really should still be buying 7200RPM drives. For the longest time I'd never consider anything else, and for a single-drive desktop I'd still stick with it. However, for systems with OS on SSD and large media on HD I should probably think about dropping to 5400RPM and saving money/power and gaining reliability.
On Windows I need to think about SSDs and gaming. I really don't want to buy a huge SSD - so I should probably consider installing everything to a large HD and then just m
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Windows is a pain in the ass, but with some determination you can set everything up on the SSD and then use "junction points" from the rescue disk to connect to a Users directory on a big spinning drive. If you are willing to get about 90% of the way there with just conventional tools, you can just move the "My Documents, My Music, etc." type directories by right-clicking on them, selecting Properties, and then going to the Location tab. From there you can move them to the spinning disk. This is fine if you
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\Users on the spinning drive means your firefox cache, mails (for people who use mail clients) and other little data (configuration, some pictures, boring documents etc.) sits there too instead of being on SSD. I'd be curious to see if it's better to have Windows on HDD and \Users on SSD instead.
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I'm thinking (hoping?) that normal disk caching would take care of stuff like that. Honestly, I'd just use the supported method unless your SSD was very, very tiny. I use the junction point method because I wipe out the C: drive from time to time to avoid Windows cruft. Every so often I apply Windows updates and re-baseline.
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Or even easier, just cut and paste the directories to where you want them and Windows takes care of updating the locations.
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Thanks, I did not know that. But to be clear, this does not create junction points... this is the "official" method that I reference. I don't want people cutting-and-pasting Users :)
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I really don't want to buy a huge SSD - so I should probably consider installing everything to a large HD and then just moving data to SSD when it is in use. I just don't know how well-supported that is in Windows.
What you're asking for there sounds a lot like what the hybrid drives do, and they don't need any software support. I'm happily using one of the Seagate SSHD hybrids in one laptop. It's a nice middle step between the speed of full SSD and the capacity of a regular drive. I got 1TB and faster boots than a regular drive for something like $60.
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Do the maths.
That's why I was wondering if it made sense to drop to 5400RPM. Most of the stuff that needs performance is small, and would benefit from being on a cheap, small, SSD. Most of the stuff that is big doesn't involve a lot of random seeks, and that would benefit from being on a big, slow, cheap HD.
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Define 'small'.
I have games that are pushing 50 gigs each.
It doesn't take many of those to fill up a 'small' SSD, and copying things back and forth between an SSD and a hard drive when you want to play a game gets annoying fast.
And yes, games benefit from being on an SSD. Besides the levels loading faster, I get much smoother framerates in games with large textures when playing from SSD. Seek times matter.
(This is especially visible in games that stream loading, like MMOs. Lord of the Rings Online, in parti
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And that is exactly why I'm not using an SSD right now for many games. The SSD prices are getting to the point where you might be able to get 2-3 large ones on a reasonably-priced SSD, which is probably good enough. I don't tend to randomly switch between large games - I tend to play them for stretches so moving them around is more practical.
128-256GB SSDs aren't horribly priced. That is where a gamer would probably want to be right now (assuming they don't just want to blow hundreds of dollars on storag
Man, am I old ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember punching the side of 360K floppies to get another 360K on the other side.
Now you can buy a couple of gigs of USB drive next to the gum in the express lane at Wal Mart.
This stuff is awesome and all, but sometimes it's hard to really wrap my head around that pretty much everything about computers (except for physical size) is a billion times bigger than when I started using computers.
It really is hard to explain to people that at one point your entire digital life was about 20 floppy disks in a plastic case, and that what was once a completely hypothetical amount of storage is commonplace.
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I remember erasing bootleg Doctor Demented/Dementoid ? radio shows so I could save a new version of a program I had written on my commodore 64.
I don't think I found how many KB a 60 / 90 or 110 minute Sony audiotape would hold. If anyone remembers please post.
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I remember buying my first computer. It had a 40 megabyte hard drive and I thought: "This is HUGE! There is no way I'll EVER fill this up." Now, can put thousands of times that amount on a microSD card the size of my fingernail. I just bought a 3TB external hard drive because our old 1TB models were filling up.
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I remember when we just hooked them into a personal tape drive to load something that will fail an hour later at the very end of the load.
Good times.... was something no one said.
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C64 Cassette tape (Datasette I think was the name) here.
One of the best parts - the reader/writer head tended to be off alignment, so there were times you couldn't even share cassettes with your friends - though I was the only one with a Commodore computer anyway (the friends in my pay grade had no comp, my rich friends had Apple II series).
And my first computer had 2KB of RAM, I'm typing this from a 12Gb Desktop.
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C64 Cassette tape (Datasette I think was the name) here.
One of the best parts - the reader/writer head tended to be off alignment, so there were times you couldn't even share cassettes with your friends - though I was the only one with a Commodore computer anyway (the friends in my pay grade had no comp, my rich friends had Apple II series).
And my first computer had 2KB of RAM, I'm typing this from a 12Gb Desktop.
From memory, some loaders/compressors would display a visual "picture" indicating whether the head was aligned according to the data on the tape - then you could use a tiny screwdriver (hole pre-made for the purpose in the device), to properly align the head.
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1mhz 6502 (Score:2)
Yeah, I remember when 1mhz was fast.
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3.5 Mhz Z80 Sinclair Spectrum FTW !
Megahurtz Powah !!!
360K already double-sided (Score:2)
Sorry, punching the tab out on the other side so that you could flip the disk over only worked on single-sided drives.
Single-sided, single-density: 90K
Single-sided, double-density: 180K
Double-sided, double-density: 360K
So if you were already at 360K, you were already double-sided.
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wrong, there was also 80 cylinder, 96 TPI, single sided, double density, 360Kb disk
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http://www.3480-3590-data-conv... [3480-3590-...ersion.com]
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Thanks for finding that source! I was looking at the list of floppy disk formats on Wikipedia to respond, and it didn't have that.
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No, I had a Teac DSDD drive on my TRS-80 Model I. I had to build a custom disk controller to support it though. This was in '80, so it predated the IBM PC by about a year and a half. Also, the PC used soft sectors, didn't it? The TRS-80 drive controllers were all hard sector.
I also had a Shugart 35-track SSDD drive, if I remember correctly.
It's obviously been a while, but I remember 35 track hard sector SSSD, 40 track hard sector SSSD, 40 track hard sector SSDD, and the brilliant Holy Grail of 40 track DSDD
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Uh, if I remember correctly, PCs used both sides of the disk. Apple ][s did not.
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Well, there was a point (and I am talking DOS here) where some PCs did.
Because I used to own the little punch thingy and did it. I did not own an Apple.
I honestly don't recall the disk sizes, so I could be wrong about that.
But, since I had a PC in around 1984/1985 which did this, I can tell you that some of them did use single sided floppies. Granted, it was a crappy Tandy PC, so it was extra useless and special. I had a whole 256K of RAM, so 640K seemed like so much. :-P
On a machine running DOS, I most
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Someone else pointed out that 360K was double sided double density disks, so yours probably was before that. I think that was the 90K single sided single density disks (the Apple ][s were superior during that time, being capable of 140K... :P :P Though, sadly, they never got to double density drives)
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in the end we will all be "rm -rf yourlife"
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My wife's photographs, taken recreationally only, can amount to a couple hundred GB per month. She does pare it down to 100GB or so sometime later. What's so "hard" to understand here? Our photo archive is almost 10TB at this point. Music - about 10GB. Family videos - 2TB or so.
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Are you sure? An average iPhone JPEG is only 2 MBytes or so, right? That means your wife is taking 50,000 photos a month? That's 2 photos per minute every minute she is awake, if I did the math correctly.
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Those aren't iPhone JPEGs, but ~20 Mpixel RAW files, and there are thousands of them each month - closer to 10k, really. These days it's really easy to generate vast numbers of pictures when you have a good camera. When she shoots kids, it's 10 shots per second, often until the buffer fills up after 50-60 shots. I'd say she takes on average 300 shots per day. It really doesn't take very long to have that many. If the camera was any faster, it'd have been more I'm afraid :)
Re:Man, am I old ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Taking that many pictures of "life" events, unless you're a photographer professionally, is completely void of meaning. The problem is, if your too busy taking pictures, you are NOT participating. Personally, I take a few pictures, to remind me, and then participate, which provides me with way more satisfaction than if I were sitting on the sidelines snapping hundreds of photos.
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Those aren't iPhone JPEGs, but ~20 Mpixel RAW files, and there are thousands of them each month - closer to 10k, really. These days it's really easy to generate vast numbers of pictures when you have a good camera. When she shoots kids, it's 10 shots per second, often until the buffer fills up after 50-60 shots. I'd say she takes on average 300 shots per day. It really doesn't take very long to have that many. If the camera was any faster, it'd have been more I'm afraid :)
Not even with a "good" camera does the average consumer generate that much data, especially every single day. Remember that more pictures have been taken with an iPhone than any other piece of image-recording hardware in human history, so even owning a "good" camera these days is considered an oddity.
And 10 shots per second outputting to RAW file format is hardly recreational. You're not sharing those over MMS with the grandparents, and Kim Kardashian doesn't take that many pictures in a day, and she wrot
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Yeah, but a better camera will be more than that. My wife and I took over 7000 pictures on our honeymoon (which lasted about a month) with a Canon camera. That's about 7MB/picture (seems to go up to about 12 for JPEG). If we'd taken them in RAW (which, arguably, we should have since some of the shots would be nice to reedit or do lens correction on) it would've been around 25 to 30MB/image with our camera. If you use sports mode (taking 10 or 15 shots every time you push the button), I could easily see
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But the problem I have with this is, the WHY. I am not a big picture taker; but seriously what are really doing with 7000 pictures of anything?
Nobody is cataloging every shot, and nobody really needs the 15 shots taken in the space of 3 seconds using sports mode / virtual motor wind etc. You need the "best" shot(s) from that group.
Nobody is realistically going to want sort through 1000 shots in the album "Pictures of the kids Tuesday December 16th 2014" looking for that special memory the want to revisit,
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It really depends on why you're taking the pictures. If you are just trying to have the memory, then yeah, you don't need 15 pictures in sports mode. But if you're trying to do something artistic then that's how you do it. And while you *can* sift through and delete all the ones that aren't the best, it's a lot easier to *not* have to do that and just store 'em. How much is your time worth vs. $250 for an 8 TB hard drive that can store, probably, all the pictures we'll take in the next 15 years.
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So you take the photos but then never look at them - since it's easier not to do that and just store 'em?
Why bother taking them in the first place?
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You guys took about 15 pictures/hour on your honeymoon? (assuming 8 hours/day of sleep)
When did you guys find time to fuck?
What do you think is *IN* those 7000 pictures? Hint: it ain't the local scenery or tourist spots....
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I design audio for theater. I have a 3TB archive of my designs and it grows about 300GB per year (musicals, where I do recording, take about 100GB per show). My wife likes taking pictures and she generates a few gigabytes per month of pictures. Many people keep movies. My parents have an archive of their favorite (broadcast) TV shows that they recorded with EyeTV. You're right that it's extremely likely that nobody will care about most of this stuff when we die. But we're still alive. What's so hard
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It's harder for me to listen to users justify their "need" for several hundred gigabytes or even terabytes of storage for their personal archives.
Call somebody a pat rat hoarder in real life and they'll likely become horribly offended. Accuse them of the same thing in virtual space, and they wear it like a badge of honor.
I wonder if the average consumer realizes that when they die, no one will give a shit about going through terabytes of crap.
Hoarding physical objects takes up increasing amounts of physical space. Instead of a basement filled with a hundred boxes, I have 8 TB of archived data that takes up about the same amount of physical space as a single hard cover book.
And I couldn't care less what anyone else thinks of my terabytes of stuff. it's for me, not them. And when I die I'm sure they'll just throw it out and free up those few precious square inches of 'wasted' space.
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It's harder for me to listen to users justify their "need" for several hundred gigabytes or even terabytes of storage for their personal archives.
Call somebody a pat rat hoarder in real life and they'll likely become horribly offended. Accuse them of the same thing in virtual space, and they wear it like a badge of honor.
I wonder if the average consumer realizes that when they die, no one will give a shit about going through terabytes of crap.
Hoarding physical objects takes up increasing amounts of physical space. Instead of a basement filled with a hundred boxes, I have 8 TB of archived data that takes up about the same amount of physical space as a single hard cover book.
And I couldn't care less what anyone else thinks of my terabytes of stuff. it's for me, not them. And when I die I'm sure they'll just throw it out and free up those few precious square inches of 'wasted' space.
The entire point here is your data isn't even for you when there's a damn good chance that you will never look at 90% of it ever again.
Convenience is not a substitution for pure, unadulterated laziness. Buying a huge warehouse doesn't fix the problem of hoarding any more than buying a larger hard drive does.
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Sure I probably won't look at over 90% of my data ever again. If you can tell me now today which 10% I will look at again you can have everything I own.
As hoarding data is both cheap financially and physically, aka the downside is very small it makes sense.
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I don't take pictures for "posterity", or for people who outlive me. I take pictures for me, and my family, for now. While I only have thousands of total pictures, (not 10,000 per month) I can still find the pictures I want on my hard drives. So when I die, if some future grandchild wants to trawl through those terabytes in the vain hopes of finding a good picture of a great-great-grandparent they never met, why should I care? What difference would that make to me, today, in how I choose to save or disc
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I keep a highly organized well structured system of directories. I don't know what all I got; and I delete things when I know I won't want them again. Actually its taken me years to train myself to be a little slower on the delete key trigger, space *is* cheap and its better to keep something you might want than regret having purged it later, no fun having to wait while your box huts through that multi-volume tar streamed over 5 USB sticks. I keep my entire digital life, which includes things like my mus
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if I packrat digitally, I just fill up maybe a corner on my desk.
If I packrat IRL, the cops will break down the door because there's probably a dead animal or two in my apartment and i'm probably nose deaf to it.
When I die I don't care who's going through my digital shit. Unless I've got a backup of my consciousness sitting on a disk somewhere. In which case, DON'T THROW THAT AWAY.
Hitachi 6TB (Score:2)
Re:Meaningless? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know... I find it odd that the WD drives, at the 5400rpm speed, were able to write data faster than the 7200rpm Seagate drives. That seems counter-intuitive.
It's also nice to see all of the drives go through that sort of "punishment" without a single failure - out of the box. NewEgg reviews aren't terribly helpful, since most only leave reviews when they have issues, and only a few customers ever bother to leave good reviews unless they are overwhelmed by the quality of a product.
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caching isn't a hard concept.
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Are you saying seagate doesn't have caching?
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I'm saying it has half as much. Which gives worse results.
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Seeing that the specific Seagate model they used have 128MB cache and the WD model had 64MB cache, I'm not sure how more cache makes it slower.
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The one with slower drive speed has more cache (Seagate), making it actually faster.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/... [bhphotovideo.com]
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I find it odd that the WD drives, at the 5400rpm speed, were able to write data faster than the 7200rpm Seagate drives.
Maybe the Seagates are more sensitive to vibration, either from making more of it when you shove 45 into a cheap metal box, or by being less tolerant to it because they're pushed harder.
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I find it odd that the WD drives, at the 5400rpm speed, were able to write data faster than the 7200rpm Seagate drives. That seems counter-intuitive.
If there are less platters in the WD then the density will mean a speed boost even at a lower spin speed.
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Seagate isn't using SMR [storagenewsletter.com] on the 6TB drives, at least not yet as far as I know. That's rolling out with the 8TB models.
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Re:Meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)
That was about the most useless set of HDD statistics I've ever seen. You don't need more than one drive each to compare power consumption and performance.
So you think there's 0 variance?
NOTHING was said about reliability and who cares how much data was stored on them vs how long it was in service. Those two numbers are completely arbitrary.
45 drives each, no initial failures, no failures in the first 3 months. Right there that tells me the WD Red 6TB drives are hugely better than the 4TB drives I used.
Re:Meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you missed the point. Several points, in fact...
Backblaze doesn't care about one drive. Power consumption is a complicated matter, and they have a very simple plan, so it's best for them to build a full pod for testing, and compare the power and performance at the pod level. They can extrapolate that out to their planned expansion considering pods as the units of measure, rather that having to consider drives, controllers, fans, and power supplies as extra variables. That simplification is partly why they're using a pod architecture in the first place.
Reliability doesn't matter much to Backblaze, either. They store redundant copies of data, so their risk of loss is mitigated, jjust as it should be for any enterprise use of such drives.
When you ask "who cares how much data was stored on them vs how long it was in service", clearly the answer is Backblaze, because they cared enough to study that particular metric.
Now, all of this is really only obviously useful to Backblaze. They're running tests in their environment, with their design, for their criteria. Realistically, the vast majority of Slashdotters won't ever handle anything like Backblaze's system, so they have different priorities. Backblaze still released their test results, just in case anyone cares. That's why they've gathered such a following among nerds. They've repeatedly published their research openly, contributing to the public knowledge base for system engineers. Maybe somebody finds it useful, and maybe not, but it's still a noble principle they practice.
Re:Meaningless (Score:5, Informative)
> They've repeatedly published their research openly... just in case anyone cares.
"Research" sounds too official, more like "observations in our environment", but THANK YOU for the kind words. What baffles me is why nobody else publishes these sorts of drive statistics. Why is Amazon silent? Why doesn't Google name drive names and failure rates? And if the answer is: "Google gets a great price on drives in exchange for their silence" then why hasn't Backblaze been offered a deal to keep quiet yet?! I'm serious, how big do you have to get before you get the better prices on drives? We essentially pay "retail".
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Well, there was a google paper about drive failures a few years back, but I don't think they named names...
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Well, retail at the 10,000 drive order level :-)
Re:Meaningless (Score:5, Informative)
You might be surprised how little discount we get. Our last purchase of 4 TByte Hitachi drives (960 drives in one purchase) we paid $135 each before tax and shipping. "B&H Photo" sometimes wins the bid (I don't know how or why), but you can basically get that same price within a couple bucks in units of 1 or 2 from their website. Note: we have no affiliation with B&H other than satisfied customers, and B&H do not win the bid every time.
With that said, if anybody knows how to get more than $2 off "retail" please PLEASE let us know!!
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In Google's big paper on drive reliability [googleusercontent.com], they claimed "we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to the proprietary nature of these data". I'm not sure exactly what that means. Might be part of their purchasing contract, to reduce liability for naming bad vendors, or it might be considering that information a competitive advantage.
I'm surprised Backblaze has published so much without getting into lawsuit trouble already. If you wonder why you haven't been offered a b
Re:Meaningless (Score:4, Insightful)
Hopefully "the truth" is a valid defense?
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Hopefully "the truth" is a valid defense?
Libel and slander against an individual is generally invalidated if you're making a truthful and factual statement. There are exceptions, like when there is intention of malice [google.com]. And the minute you layer any opinion onto what are straight facts, you're in fuzzy territory.
And statements published by a company about another company are not necessarily protected by the sort of free speech guidelines that guide individual interaction. I don't claim to know those rules. No larger company would publish this so
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I would personally like to see Western Digital sue Backblaze claiming that the WD Red drives specifically designed for NAS are not being used in their intended environment.
As for the criticism, I don't think there's such a thing as an intended environment for a HDD other than ruggedly mobile or stationary. I'm typing this from a laptop right now. Who is a harddrive vendor to say the level of vibration, temperature or movement my laptop experiences? At the same time I want those vendors to come out and tell
Re:Meaningless (Score:4, Insightful)
The intended environment for WD's drives includes a description of how many drives should be in the array. They are numbers like "NAS with 1 to 5 disks". They state that the lower tier models will not work well inside of massive arrays, where things like vibration need to be better controlled. Their more expensive models have specific technology (at an extra cost) aimed at keeping vibration related issues under better control.
BackBlaze ignores those guidelines, putting drives that were not designed for the vibration of a dense drive array into one. When Backblaze drives fail, it's completely appropriate to ask "would they have failed there if they were used only as specified"?, which means putting them into smaller arrays. There's a very real possibility that the failure rate heavy reflects that unusual setup, and that it is not representative of reliability for the disks in other environments.
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"NAS with 1 to 5 disks" is not an environmental spec.
The number of discs does not relate to the vibration or heat or any other factors. Those can only be measured directly. Now if WD specified that drives should not be placed in an environment where they will be subjected to x um vibration measured to some ISO standard then I would be right there with you.
How do 1-5 disks compare to a computer with 5 poorly balanced fans?
How do 1-5 disks compare to a single metal enclosure direct mounted, vs disks mounted v
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The number of discs does not relate to the vibration or heat or any other factors.
They are correlated. More discs guarantees more vibration and heat, all other things being equal. Yes, there are other sources too, and all the other things are not equal. So what?
That you are calling ""NAS with 1-5 disks" a subjective specification means you're not actually using words in a way I can respond to there. Whether Backblaze's custom modifications net better or worse levels of vibration is a complicated discussion that could use some direct measurements; agreed. But what's extremely clear i
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They are correlated. More discs guarantees more vibration and heat, all other things being equal.
No they aren't. It's an indirect association combined with a lot of subjective assumptions. Are vibrations in phase or out of phase? Are they co-coherent? Having 2 vibrating sources does not guarantee an increase in environment vibration. You can have anything from an doubling to a complete elimination to changing frequencies with no change in magnitude. Regardless of what you say measuring vibration in "number of disks in a NAS" is not at all any kind of engineering specification. It's like measuring load
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"we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintagedue to the proprietary nature of these data". I'm not sure exactly what that means.
Perhaps part of their discount is tied to a deal to provide exclusive data of failure rates to the manufacturers? Same effect as buying silence, but seemingly more legit.
Re:Meaningless (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd love to be able to publish these statistics for our organization, (I'd estimate we have close to a quarter million drives in the field) but there is a big hurdle in the way: legal liability. If I was to say something negative about Western-Sea-Tachi drives, their lawyers might call our lawyers, and we could easily spend a million in court fees.
The thing I think would be interesting is that we have a completely arbitrary mix of drives, based on drive availability over the last 6 years or so. We also have a mix of different service companies who replace the drives in our workstations. Our contract is such that we don't control the brands, or even the sizes, as long as they meet or exceed our specs. As a service organization, they're responsible for picking the cheapest option for themselves. If our spec says "40 GB minimum", and they can't get anything smaller than 500GB, they'll buy those. If 1TB drives are cheaper than 500GB drives, they'll buy those. And if we're paying them $X/machine/year for service, they can do the reliability decisions on their own, so if they think some premium drives will last two years longer than stock drives, they might be able to avoid an extra service call on each machine if they spend $Y extra per drive. I expect these service organizations all have their preferred drives, but that's not data they're likely to share with their competitors on the service-contract circuit.
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You might be shocked (shocked I tell you ) at how capricious a lot of those decisions are.
Re:Meaningless (Score:4, Interesting)
I work at Backblaze.
Then you boys should make an app that every computer enthusiast can use that tracks smart stats/drive failures and collects them at your servers. It'd be great to monitor drives across the internet with an application that you could just have minimized to the taskbar, maybe you could kickstart the funds for one? Many of us would gladly pitch in to get reliable drive data on a massive scale. Many of us are on the net anyway it would be great to report drive usage/characteristics in realtime across the internet.
I've been using stuff like below to "wing" whether a drive needs to be replaced or not, but usually drives start clicking before they go.
http://panterasoft.com/hdd-hea... [panterasoft.com]
Re:Meaningless (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this would be really awesome. Here's where it gets neat-> we already have an app running in hundreds of thousands of desktop and laptop computers! (Our "online backup application" involves a tiny service that runs to send your files at the datacenter through HTTPS.) So if we just updated the client with a small amount of statistics tracking (and maybe a nice checkbox to opt in or out) then we could immediately start collecting info.
Sort of related: A few years ago I played an online 3D video game (can't remember which one, might have been Quake?) that you could both report your graphics card and RAM configuration to the server, and the server would list the aggregate statistics. So there is some precedent for this kind of data collection and publication.
Re:Meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)
"Research" sounds too official, more like "observations in our environment"
Step #1 of real science.
Re:Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Marketing (Score:5, Informative)
We do these drive statistics and observations originally for our own selfish internal reasons - this is information that is important for running our business. When we then release this kind of information, the info release is largely because it helps people hear about our company (and also maybe a little of "good for humanity" motivation thrown in there, we're Slashdot kind of people, we work in technology in Silicon Valley). But let me be clear: the information is as accurate as we can possibly make it, and we aren't pulling any punches and we aren't "in bed with" any drive manufacturers. I see this as a WIN-WIN. You get accurate and free information, and a few people hear our company name and look into what we do and maybe we gain a few customers. These posts are often written by the engineers working on the system and are trying to be as straight-forward and non-marketing as we can be.
Re: (Score:2)
I thought it was a pretty good write up, without any particular spin on the marketing side (except, of course, it was on the BB site with the logo). There's no shame in presenting data that could be useful to those of us who don't have the opportunity (or budget) to buy a stack of drives and run them full out for 3 months. Though I'm sure I'm not the only person who thought it sounds kind of crazy to be adding a pod every day just to keep up with the data demands.
Re: (Score:2)
As much as I'm sure you're right, I think this is a great way to perform advertising. No flash animations, no autoplay video or sound clips, no clickbait... Just pure data-driven performance benchmarking. It's like they're saying "Let's attract tech-savvy customers by publishing something that will actually be informative and/or interesting to them, and then maybe some of them will be interested in what we sell" I can totally get behind this form of marketing!
It's effective. They're still my first recommendation to friends and family even though I've moved to a competitor (needed Linux support).
Re: (Score:2)
The author bio says "Andy has 20+ years experience in technology marketing". They're not exactly being evasive about the marketing angle of the blog.
Re: (Score:2)
no, really, not enough said.
do you have a problem with giving vendors your private key? what problem would that be?
they're a US company -- does that engender trust or suspicion?
Re:Backups are not secure (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: I'm a Backblaze engineer who wrote a lot of that code.
Your statement is a bit misleading, there are two levels of security in Backblaze. Data is always encrypted, and the "private key" is a totally standard OpenSSL PEM file that yes, we store for you. By default, this PEM file is secured by a passphrase that Backblaze knows, so your data is essentially only secured by your email address and password and you can recover your password by email. This is pretty light security (if somebody has access to your email they can recover your password), so it's best for backups of stuff you wouldn't mind too much if somebody got ahold of it, like say pictures of your cat. Don't laugh, I backup my public website on Backblaze servers, there is valuable data in the world that does not need encryption, that would be info you don't want to lose but is ALSO publicly readable.
So if you are concerned at all about security, you can set your own personal "passphrase" on that PEM file that Backblaze absolutely never writes to disk - we don't store it. But if you do this you MUST remember that passphrase or your data is GONE. Without that passphrase, nobody will ever retrieve your data, not you, not the US government, not the NSA, NOBODY. You cannot "recover" that passphrase, and we don't know it. This is a good mode of security if you would be arrested on the spot for the contents of your files if the NSA got ahold of your data, because we really don't think it is breakable.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We do use AES to encrypt the files. We used a well known design where we use the public key to encrypt the AES256 key and FEK, then we use the AES key to symmetrically encrypt the file. Then we can use the passphrase to encrypt the private key. So it's kind of an onion, you use the passphrase, decrypt the private key, which is then used to decrypt the AES key and FEK, which is then used to decrypt the file. (We didn't invent thi
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. If the data is decrypted within Backblaze before being transmitted out...fail. Whether or not they store that private key only impacts how they can act when the person requesting the data isn't accessing it. Someone who sniffs the whole operation at the right place in the network while you're accessing your data will still get it. The only hope of real security you have is if the data is encrypted all the way to your computer, and then only decrypted there. Anything less is kidding yourself.
Re: (Score:2)
"while you're accessing your data"
That's really the critical part, isn't it? If you're using this for backup you should never need to decrypt it. The only time you need it is if you have a local failure. Then you have to make a choice: give up the data or take a chance that they are at the server siphoning off your data as you request it.
For 99.999999999% of data, I'm going to say that the US government doesn't give a fuck and the chance that they're monitoring your account when your local copy fails and yo
Re: (Score:2)
> with passphrases in case the PC is hacked. That's how important keeping the
> private key completely private is.
The flaw in your design is that when the PC dies, you can no longer decrypt the backup because you just lost the private key.
Some online backup companies in the past have solved this by having you store your private key in yet a 3rd party "escrow" location, so you don't have the only copy and ye
Re: (Score:2)
My bank now offers a storage space that is supposed to automatically receive bills and similar crap (for now .pdf bank statements land there, which is pretty cool if I somehow need to find that old stuff) ; files can be stored as well, uploaded to the web interface, no other means available.
That seems to be a good place to store keys. Else I'd be thinking of paper notes in a bank safe (and/or the kind of attorney that does things on your behalf when you're dead or incapacitated, in growing order of cost)
Re:Just noise (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if your sample N is 40,000 drives as theirs has been in the past, and you're operating with reasonably rigorous methodology to track problems, then you've got a good case. Write up your experience, and note N. (For 6TB drives, their N is very pretty small, and even moving forward they're only adding 230 WD drives).
I don't think you've got a good case to argue that a sample of 40,000 drives is "noise", but you could well be right about the much tinier smaller samples for 6TB drives. Assuming you've got tens of thousands of Seagates being heavily used, if your results differ from their past ones, that would be very interesting. Publish.
About the only takeaway there is that WD loads faster (about a TB/day, an unexpected result) and uses slightly less electricity.
Re: (Score:2)
No no no! Any random Internet user's personal experience trumps any data you have!