Backblaze Drive Stats for 2022(backblaze.com)
backblaze.com
Backblaze Drive Stats for 2022
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2022/
80 comments
> they purchase drives in large quantities direct from manufacturers
Given that the manufacturer knows that Backblaze publishes its influential drive stats... do we know that the drive units that the manufacturer ships to Backblaze are representative of the quality of the same models available at retail?
Given that the manufacturer knows that Backblaze publishes its influential drive stats... do we know that the drive units that the manufacturer ships to Backblaze are representative of the quality of the same models available at retail?
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.
> Do we know if these drives are the same as you would purchase in a retail outlet
Seagate (for instance) won't sell ANYBODY drives directly, so they force us to get bids from various resellers and distributors. So when we pick the lowest price, I don't think Seagate knows who the drives are going to, but there might be a trick in there somewhere I am not aware of.
> Do we know if these drives are the same as you would purchase in a retail outlet
Seagate (for instance) won't sell ANYBODY drives directly, so they force us to get bids from various resellers and distributors. So when we pick the lowest price, I don't think Seagate knows who the drives are going to, but there might be a trick in there somewhere I am not aware of.
Have you considered becoming a distributor yourself? I would assume at a certain purchasing scale, the cost benefit is apparent, but perhaps not.
This is why every major tech company eventually becomes a domain registrar.
Do all major tech companies really register that many domains? I assumed that becoming a registrar was more about pushing your control up the pipeline to reduce risk if things like losing your domain name was the main reason. Rather than saving money on registrations.
If we assume that Backblaze gets special treatment from every manufactured who supplies it, that would suggest we're seeing stats that are the best the manufacturer can manage. Which seems a reasonable proxy for what they sell (lots of statistical quibbling about this view aside).
Any more special treatment than they give AWS, GCP or Azure? I feel they just manufacture them all the same because there's no point in doing anyone any favors.
I don't think anyone imagines that the hard drive manufacturers are making special drives for Backblaze. The question is 'Are they getting the cream of the crop?' out of all the drives that are manufactured.
Every drive must go through a series of tests before it is judged suitable for sale to the consumer. Drives that fall below a certain threshold are judged 'failed' but there can be a variety of drives that fall within the 'passed' range. Some are just barely above the threshold, others are way above.
It is kind of like binning for CPUs. The very best ones can have their base clocks increased and sold at a premium. The same kind of differentiation could be done for hard drives.
Every drive must go through a series of tests before it is judged suitable for sale to the consumer. Drives that fall below a certain threshold are judged 'failed' but there can be a variety of drives that fall within the 'passed' range. Some are just barely above the threshold, others are way above.
It is kind of like binning for CPUs. The very best ones can have their base clocks increased and sold at a premium. The same kind of differentiation could be done for hard drives.
During the time that I interned at Imprimis in 1989 (just before they got bought by Seagate, and before I started my first "real" job at the Defense Information Systems Agency in the basement of the Pentagon, I know that I heard the manager of Manufacturing Engineering tell the engineers on multiple occasions that a certain manufacturer was coming through for a clean room visit in a certain number of days, and so the engineers had to clear the space of all drives that had certain types of failures.
They also definitely did a binning process where all drives being sold to certain manufacturers would be heavily tested for certain types of failure modes and only those that passed the most rigorous tests in a certain area would be approved to be sold to certain manufacturers.
Of course, each manufacturer had their own things that they were concerned about.
I don't know if they still do binning today, but they certainly did it back in 1989.
They also definitely did a binning process where all drives being sold to certain manufacturers would be heavily tested for certain types of failure modes and only those that passed the most rigorous tests in a certain area would be approved to be sold to certain manufacturers.
Of course, each manufacturer had their own things that they were concerned about.
I don't know if they still do binning today, but they certainly did it back in 1989.
Oh, and even back then, Apple always got the cream of the crop.
You converge to the mean fairly quickly. Build a NAS of 12 drives and those stats become meaningful.
That being said with 50TB drives just around the corner [1] and SSD caching becoming the norm, 12 bays consumer NAS will become rare.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/18733/seagate-confirms-30tb-h...
That being said with 50TB drives just around the corner [1] and SSD caching becoming the norm, 12 bays consumer NAS will become rare.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/18733/seagate-confirms-30tb-h...
Why do you think that 50TB drives will make 12 bay NAS become rare?
I don't know, my own experience is that drive capacity increase exponentially but my storage need are fairly linear, bigger files but not that many more bigger files.
I've noticed that media files seem to look "good enough" at 720p for cartoons and 1080p for live action. I know some people obsess over the highest quality of everything (4k 10bit HDR) but even those came out in 2016[1] and aren't that popular. Higher definition like 8k is basically non existent, it can't run on old HDMI cables and needs both a beefy decoder (Blasting heat) and a powerful display driver as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_HD_Blu-ray
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_HD_Blu-ray
[deleted]
We'll just hoard bigger files, like thus far.
My iPhone shoots 90 megabyte photos.
My iPhone shoots 90 megabyte photos.
Thats is quite poor compression. My 26 mpix Fujifilm cameras makes ~30 MB compressed RAFs that for sure has better image quality in final output.
The iPhone is 48 megapixels.
Yea, clear demonstration why more pixels ≠ better quality. But ridicolous amount of data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_photography
Specifically, the night mode on recent (2y) devices.
Specifically, the night mode on recent (2y) devices.
At what point to increased rebuild times mean that the increased redundancy requirements overwhelm the increased capacity? If you're running large parity groups, the redundancy required is rather small, but when you move to smaller raid groups allowing for a second (or third) drive failure significantly impacts total storage.
Agree, but that's what backups are for. RAID5 isn't a backup, it's a way to stay online during the rebuild. If you are using RAID5 but don't backup your files, you probably don't care about those files that much.
If you want <X% chance of having to restore from backups, and rebuild times go up, you'll need to switch from RAID5 to RAID6 in order to maintain that.
RAID or not, if you lose an active drive you will need to 1) restore from backup, 2) fill a new backup drive
If it takes days to fill your new 50 TB backup drive, you have the same problem RAID5 has with rebuild times. The drive might fail in the middle.
RAID isn't a backup mostly because if you overwrite RAID data, you wrote over every copy at once. Non RAID offsite backups don't solve any problem related to drive size, they just make it a lot less likely for a single event to take everything out in the same minute.
If it takes days to fill your new 50 TB backup drive, you have the same problem RAID5 has with rebuild times. The drive might fail in the middle.
RAID isn't a backup mostly because if you overwrite RAID data, you wrote over every copy at once. Non RAID offsite backups don't solve any problem related to drive size, they just make it a lot less likely for a single event to take everything out in the same minute.
> RAID or not, if you lose an active drive you will need to 1) restore from backup
Er what? I've had production machines lose a drive, have it replaced, and never leave production. Why would you need to restore from backups?
Er what? I've had production machines lose a drive, have it replaced, and never leave production. Why would you need to restore from backups?
Right, that was said very poorly. What I really wanted to express was that you need to fill a new drive either way, either by resilver or by making a new backup. Point one is bad, not sure why I wrote that!
Absolutely, you want RAID + backup, not one or the other.
50TB at 200MB/s is about 72h. Doesn't seem to be a particularly problematic rebuild time (and that's assuming 100% filled). Of course you need to do regular data scrubbing. If your rebuild is the first time the data is being read in 5y, that might not go so well.
50TB at 200MB/s is about 72h. Doesn't seem to be a particularly problematic rebuild time (and that's assuming 100% filled). Of course you need to do regular data scrubbing. If your rebuild is the first time the data is being read in 5y, that might not go so well.
> 50TB at 200MB/s is about 72h.
Assuming the device is offline for users during that time, otherwise there may be reduced throughput.
Assuming the device is offline for users during that time, otherwise there may be reduced throughput.
Yes, and this can be quite painful.
If you have standby sets (like a read replica of a db that can take over for master, or a DR site), you can switch temporarily.
It’s good to know what throughput you have under load for this reason among others.
Also, you can slow or pause some RAID during peak hours.
If you have standby sets (like a read replica of a db that can take over for master, or a DR site), you can switch temporarily.
It’s good to know what throughput you have under load for this reason among others.
Also, you can slow or pause some RAID during peak hours.
But if we are talking about a NAS, hopefully you also have SSD caching which should reduce a lot the workload on your disks.
> RAID or not, if you lose an active drive you will need to 1) restore from backup
RAID 1 joins the chat
RAID 1 joins the chat
100% with you.
Seagate is the manufacturer with drives that fail at 10x the rate of the competition. I'll avoid, because drive failures are annoying.
Seagate is the manufacturer with drives that fail at 10x the rate of the competition. I'll avoid, because drive failures are annoying.
The implication being that they might knowingly buy a subpar batch or that a manufacturer would offer rebates for a subpar batch, or what?
Not sure if that's what OP meant, but it could be that they get better batches from manufacturers, while retail gets the rest?
The other way you could read the comment would be that the stats don't mean much since Backblaze can tolerate higher defect rates if they negotiate a low enough price. But to me, that doesn't make sense since it wouldn't affect the failure rate statistics at all anyway.
The other way you could read the comment would be that the stats don't mean much since Backblaze can tolerate higher defect rates if they negotiate a low enough price. But to me, that doesn't make sense since it wouldn't affect the failure rate statistics at all anyway.
If drive A has a 3% failure/year rate and drive B a 1% failure/year rate, but you can get 12 of drive A for the price of 10 drive B and you're going to have stock on hand to replace drives anyway and you're confidant in your backup strategy then for a business it may still make sense to buy drive A.
As a consumer, you're unlikely to keep an in-box spare, so even if you have a good backup system, a drive failure is still going to be an inconvenience, and leave you without redundancy until your replacement is shipped to you, so you might pay 20% more for drive A.
As a consumer, you're unlikely to keep an in-box spare, so even if you have a good backup system, a drive failure is still going to be an inconvenience, and leave you without redundancy until your replacement is shipped to you, so you might pay 20% more for drive A.
I don't follow. The statistics backblaze post doesn't implicate that you should buy the same drives they do.
It is because of theses statistics that you have (at least an inkling of) a fighting chance to pick the drive that more suits your usecase. Or perhaps a notion of brand performance.
Of course, you won't get statistics about drives that they don't buy. And if you then assume that more expensive drives have better failure rates then that might skew the data. But in there lies a lot of assumptions you really can't make. For one, that an expensive drive for a consumer is also an expensive for backblaze. And also, that there is correlation between end user price and failure rates.
Which generally I don't really think there is, within the alternatives that the consumer have access to (and reasonable price-ranges) at least. And it probably will vary between different markets as well.
It is because of theses statistics that you have (at least an inkling of) a fighting chance to pick the drive that more suits your usecase. Or perhaps a notion of brand performance.
Of course, you won't get statistics about drives that they don't buy. And if you then assume that more expensive drives have better failure rates then that might skew the data. But in there lies a lot of assumptions you really can't make. For one, that an expensive drive for a consumer is also an expensive for backblaze. And also, that there is correlation between end user price and failure rates.
Which generally I don't really think there is, within the alternatives that the consumer have access to (and reasonable price-ranges) at least. And it probably will vary between different markets as well.
Backblaze's article points out that sometimes they will buy drives that are less reliable but cheaper, as that makes sense for their business model.
The top level commenter points out that this strategy may not make as much sense for the individual consumer where you don't have backblaze levels of drives to amortise the failure probability and deal with it.
That's it, that's the point. It's not a rebuttal of the backblaze post at all, nor is it intended to be. The top level commenter was simply pointing out "don't buy mostly seagate drives because backblaze does" as backblaze explained their strategy in drive selection and some people may not consider the differences between their use case and backblaze's.
The top level commenter points out that this strategy may not make as much sense for the individual consumer where you don't have backblaze levels of drives to amortise the failure probability and deal with it.
That's it, that's the point. It's not a rebuttal of the backblaze post at all, nor is it intended to be. The top level commenter was simply pointing out "don't buy mostly seagate drives because backblaze does" as backblaze explained their strategy in drive selection and some people may not consider the differences between their use case and backblaze's.
The whole point of the statistics is that you can pick what you want. Why would you dismiss the statistics and buy what backblaze does? Defeats the entire point of the statistics and article in the first palce.
Top level comment: >This means that these stats may not be a very meaningful indication when purchasing a few drives from a retailer.
That doesn't follow.
Top level comment: >This means that these stats may not be a very meaningful indication when purchasing a few drives from a retailer.
That doesn't follow.
>Why would you dismiss the statistics and buy what backblaze does?
You assume people read the fine print and consider fine details.
The vast majority of Joes are going to ask who/what Backblaze is and what they're buying most and buy that, screw the details.
You assume people read the fine print and consider fine details.
The vast majority of Joes are going to ask who/what Backblaze is and what they're buying most and buy that, screw the details.
Even when they were shucking retail drives in the 1-4TB era, Seagate didn't have the greatest stats, with about a 5-30% failure rate (IIRC, over ~3 years or so), especially their 3T drives.
I ran an array with 1.5T and 3T Seagates and within a 1-3 years, I replaced at least 1/3 of my Seagates, but I made sure to replace the Seagates with Hitachis and Western Digitals, even though they were slightly more expensive.
I ran an array with 1.5T and 3T Seagates and within a 1-3 years, I replaced at least 1/3 of my Seagates, but I made sure to replace the Seagates with Hitachis and Western Digitals, even though they were slightly more expensive.
ST3000DM001 was terrible one. Everyone prefer WD after that (and before the WD Red SMR gate)
I don't see so much significant higher failure rate on my 12TB Seagate drive array.
I don't see so much significant higher failure rate on my 12TB Seagate drive array.
I really struggle to follow this logic.
You could argue to remove the driver that are represented less than 100 times (and it will be a stretch).
But once you have so many samples, there is no reason to not believe that your driver will not follow the same distribution.
You could argue to remove the driver that are represented less than 100 times (and it will be a stretch).
But once you have so many samples, there is no reason to not believe that your driver will not follow the same distribution.
I'll never be able to understand how Seagate manages to make so many failing hard drives. A 5.7% failure rate with an average age of 2 years? The only one that comes close is the 5.3% HGST with over twice the average age and overall low sample size.
Out of the many hard drives that I've owned in my life, the only ones to die on me have both been Seagates, with the first one being the infamous ST3000DM001, a hard drive so shit it has its own Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001).
Out of the many hard drives that I've owned in my life, the only ones to die on me have both been Seagates, with the first one being the infamous ST3000DM001, a hard drive so shit it has its own Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001).
They also have a drive on that list that has an Avg Age of 92 months, also they have significantly more Seagate drives compared to the rest. Additionally, most of these drives are consumer drives which are not intended to be ran at 100% for months on end.
having high failure rates despite having lots of drives is actually worse - there is the chance the HGST failures are just random chance due to small numbers of drives. But this possibility does not exist for Seagate with much larger statistical samples.
AFAIK there hasn't been much of a difference shown between consumer workloads and enterprise workloads for HDD lifespan either, it's just cope and theorycrafting from people who are emotionally attached to the idea of Seagate not being shit for some reason.
No other drives seem to have such problems with being used in this fashion: what is your theory for why Seagate drives are uniquely affected by being in the pods in some fashion that would not also affect WD drives or HGST drives or whoever else? Are WD drives not affected by vibration for some reason? For a while Seagate Deniers latched onto the first-gen pods as maybe being the answer but they're all long gone at this point, this failure-rate anomaly is continuing even in the newer pods.
The only reasonable possibility would be that Seagate drives are simply constructed in an entirely different, less resilient fashion, which (a) is not factually supported in any way afaik, and (b) would still be very relevant for consumers to know! It's not like a home PC is vibration-free either after all.
There comes a point when it's not "steelmanning" it's just denial of reality in the face of consistent evidence. Like you're not "steelmanning" climate change you're just a denier.
The data has pretty consistently showed the same thing for 10+ years. It's not a "random sampling bias" that uniformly affects everyone except Seagate in the exact same way almost every single survey, it's not some magical factor that makes Seagate drives uniquely unsuited to storage-array usage but magically resilient when used in a home PC, it's not first-gen backblaze pods being bad, it's just Seagate putting out shitty drives, period the end. All these extremely complex theories to get around the very simple conclusion that Seagate has shitty parts or shitty QC and the failure rates are slightly higher as a result.
A lot of the Seagate models are relatively OK, but almost all of the "outlier" drives with really high failure rates are Seagate. It is the old bayesian probability thing: get rid of Seagate and you've gotten rid of almost all of the models with high failure rates.
edit: sorry Samsung on the brain since they have another wave of SSD failures too /laugh
AFAIK there hasn't been much of a difference shown between consumer workloads and enterprise workloads for HDD lifespan either, it's just cope and theorycrafting from people who are emotionally attached to the idea of Seagate not being shit for some reason.
No other drives seem to have such problems with being used in this fashion: what is your theory for why Seagate drives are uniquely affected by being in the pods in some fashion that would not also affect WD drives or HGST drives or whoever else? Are WD drives not affected by vibration for some reason? For a while Seagate Deniers latched onto the first-gen pods as maybe being the answer but they're all long gone at this point, this failure-rate anomaly is continuing even in the newer pods.
The only reasonable possibility would be that Seagate drives are simply constructed in an entirely different, less resilient fashion, which (a) is not factually supported in any way afaik, and (b) would still be very relevant for consumers to know! It's not like a home PC is vibration-free either after all.
There comes a point when it's not "steelmanning" it's just denial of reality in the face of consistent evidence. Like you're not "steelmanning" climate change you're just a denier.
The data has pretty consistently showed the same thing for 10+ years. It's not a "random sampling bias" that uniformly affects everyone except Seagate in the exact same way almost every single survey, it's not some magical factor that makes Seagate drives uniquely unsuited to storage-array usage but magically resilient when used in a home PC, it's not first-gen backblaze pods being bad, it's just Seagate putting out shitty drives, period the end. All these extremely complex theories to get around the very simple conclusion that Seagate has shitty parts or shitty QC and the failure rates are slightly higher as a result.
A lot of the Seagate models are relatively OK, but almost all of the "outlier" drives with really high failure rates are Seagate. It is the old bayesian probability thing: get rid of Seagate and you've gotten rid of almost all of the models with high failure rates.
edit: sorry Samsung on the brain since they have another wave of SSD failures too /laugh
Either you're lucky or you just have not had that many drives around...
The first to fail was a Miniscribe 5¼" 20MB, it died after a week. I replaced it with a 3½" Seagate connected to an Adaptec RLL controller - this being before IDE was a thing the controller decided the encoding scheme and RLL gave you 50% extra storage space. This Seagate never died on me, I probably have it around somewhere still. Then came the Western Digital IDE drives, two of those died and took ~250MB of data with them to data heaven. They were followed by another WD, this one 1.2GB - it died. When I built a system around the famous Abit BP-6 motherboard I put in two Maxtor drives - which I should not have done, one of them died within 2 years. Meanwhile I'd helped my father get a new drive, one of those fancy IBM Deskstars. Within a year it had turned itself into a Deathstar like most of its brethren seem to have done. Then there was the 10 GB Travelstar which died, then the 20GB Travelstar which also died - but survived the canoe expedition over the Yukon safely tucked away into the water- and probably bulletproof solar-powered Virgin Webplayer I had made to document the 3½ month trip - and the 20GB Toshiba. The 2TB WD Green, dead. One of the 1TB WD Greens, dead - but its mate still running strong at a 120.000+ running hours with its 2TB brand mates coming in second at 100.000+ hours. In the DS4243 array I have replaced 5 15K 600GB drives, good that these were cheap as dirt (but take quite a bit of power to run, hence the low price).
Notice that I have not had a Seagate drive die on me yet. There are a few in an array somewhere here but those still do their job even though they're quite old by now. Maybe I'm just lucky in that I never bought any of the failing types since these problems seem to be related to specific types.
The first to fail was a Miniscribe 5¼" 20MB, it died after a week. I replaced it with a 3½" Seagate connected to an Adaptec RLL controller - this being before IDE was a thing the controller decided the encoding scheme and RLL gave you 50% extra storage space. This Seagate never died on me, I probably have it around somewhere still. Then came the Western Digital IDE drives, two of those died and took ~250MB of data with them to data heaven. They were followed by another WD, this one 1.2GB - it died. When I built a system around the famous Abit BP-6 motherboard I put in two Maxtor drives - which I should not have done, one of them died within 2 years. Meanwhile I'd helped my father get a new drive, one of those fancy IBM Deskstars. Within a year it had turned itself into a Deathstar like most of its brethren seem to have done. Then there was the 10 GB Travelstar which died, then the 20GB Travelstar which also died - but survived the canoe expedition over the Yukon safely tucked away into the water- and probably bulletproof solar-powered Virgin Webplayer I had made to document the 3½ month trip - and the 20GB Toshiba. The 2TB WD Green, dead. One of the 1TB WD Greens, dead - but its mate still running strong at a 120.000+ running hours with its 2TB brand mates coming in second at 100.000+ hours. In the DS4243 array I have replaced 5 15K 600GB drives, good that these were cheap as dirt (but take quite a bit of power to run, hence the low price).
Notice that I have not had a Seagate drive die on me yet. There are a few in an array somewhere here but those still do their job even though they're quite old by now. Maybe I'm just lucky in that I never bought any of the failing types since these problems seem to be related to specific types.
Looks like HGST continues to rule the pack, similar to prior years. Though, I thought the entire brand of HGST was set to be discontinued and Western Digital just taking over all naming / marketing / etc... I even see when I search for "ultrastar" or similar, it's all currently branded Western Digital. Does backblaze get some special enterprise gear?
Some (all?) rebranded "WD Ultrastar" drives still report themselves as "HGST" as their SMART device models. I'm not sure how does Blackblaze count them. Perhaps they're (correctly) counted via the SMART model regardless of branding?
Update: This issue has been covered in the Blackblaze 2020 report. They apparently existed in parallel. The original HGST drives, while still existed as of 2020, were being gradually phased out...
> These drives obviously share their lineage with the HGST drives, but they report their manufacturer as WDC versus HGST. The model numbers are similar with the first three characters changing from HUH to WUH and the last three characters changing from 604, for example, to 6L4. We don’t know the significance of that change, perhaps it is the factory location, a firmware version, or some other designation. If you know, let everyone know in the comments. As with all of the major drive manufacturers, the model number carries patterned information relating to each drive model and is not randomly generated, so the 6L4 string would appear to mean something useful.
Update: This issue has been covered in the Blackblaze 2020 report. They apparently existed in parallel. The original HGST drives, while still existed as of 2020, were being gradually phased out...
> These drives obviously share their lineage with the HGST drives, but they report their manufacturer as WDC versus HGST. The model numbers are similar with the first three characters changing from HUH to WUH and the last three characters changing from 604, for example, to 6L4. We don’t know the significance of that change, perhaps it is the factory location, a firmware version, or some other designation. If you know, let everyone know in the comments. As with all of the major drive manufacturers, the model number carries patterned information relating to each drive model and is not randomly generated, so the 6L4 string would appear to mean something useful.
Western Digital got most of HGST - however HGST's 3.5in drive business was sold to Toshiba. The HGST branding went to WD.
I believe hese new HGST drives are WDs.
The HGST drives in the older backblaze stats (which showed good reliability) continue to be manufactured by/evolved into Toshibas. There are several HGST model numbers that remained in Toshiba's lineup.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/5635/western-digital-to-sell-...
I believe hese new HGST drives are WDs.
The HGST drives in the older backblaze stats (which showed good reliability) continue to be manufactured by/evolved into Toshibas. There are several HGST model numbers that remained in Toshiba's lineup.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/5635/western-digital-to-sell-...
I tend to buy my HDDs from Provantage now-a-days. I've never bought an HGST drive (I have a combo of WD and Toshiba drives), but the HGST branding seems more prominent at Provantage (https://www.provantage.com/hgst-0f30146~7HGST0H9.htm) versus elsewhere (ex. Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Ultrastar-HUH721212ALE600-3-5-In..., though I'd never buy an HDD from Amazon today due to their shipping issues)
> though I'd never buy an HDD from Amazon today due to their shipping issues
I'm wary of Amazon due to co-mingling issues. I can't be sure I'm not getting something incorrectly packaged/labelled by another seller so I get a reconditioned (or simply counterfeit) unit instead of a new one.
I'm wary of Amazon due to co-mingling issues. I can't be sure I'm not getting something incorrectly packaged/labelled by another seller so I get a reconditioned (or simply counterfeit) unit instead of a new one.
Quoting myself [1]
Yes. WD did a rebranding exercise to try and get rid of HGST and UltraStar, not only did the retail channel and wholesale channel backfire, a certain large enterprise customer insist on the same HGST and UltraStar HDD, same model number, basically same everything. While HD could certainly ignore retail and wholesale, they cant ignore enterprise. So you still see UltraStar, and in many cases Wholesale are still calling them HGST.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28309576
Yes. WD did a rebranding exercise to try and get rid of HGST and UltraStar, not only did the retail channel and wholesale channel backfire, a certain large enterprise customer insist on the same HGST and UltraStar HDD, same model number, basically same everything. While HD could certainly ignore retail and wholesale, they cant ignore enterprise. So you still see UltraStar, and in many cases Wholesale are still calling them HGST.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28309576
I'm a total consumer in this topic, but I believe WD tried to and externally communicated that to be the plan, and drives are marked as such, but due to antitrust rulings(?) HGST remains somewhat independent and the heritages remain somewhat separate to each others. Also, there seems to be just handful of "actual" drive models in HDD market - they seem to be swapped Ladas and VW Beetles. Perhaps that makes calling them in old names make sense.
I don't trust any of these helium filled drives to last more than a decade.
Helium atom is too small and leaks through everything, eventually.
Really hope I am proven wrong.
Unfortunately what backblaze is excellently documenting is not archival use.
I've got half TB and 1TB WDC drives that are over a decade old and still spin up fine, single platter and run cool and quiet even air filled.
I think 4TB is the cutoff for air-filled but not sure anymore.
Helium atom is too small and leaks through everything, eventually.
Really hope I am proven wrong.
Unfortunately what backblaze is excellently documenting is not archival use.
I've got half TB and 1TB WDC drives that are over a decade old and still spin up fine, single platter and run cool and quiet even air filled.
I think 4TB is the cutoff for air-filled but not sure anymore.
There are helium sensors in the drives. It's reported via SMART. It's monitorable.
Just a note that there are no direct helium sensors in these drives. The status is inferred indirectly through some thermal sensors, conductivity, or something similar. I've read that the readings of the helium value are not very good and that it only puts out readings with granularity steps of 10-20% each. It's not great.
Many 8 TB and even up some 12 TB I believe don't have helium. It depends on the model and manufacturer, so you have to dig into the spec sheets to figure it out.
But is the helium really required for the drive to function or is it just an efficiency thing? So that if all the helium leaks out the drive would just be slower or consume more power?
I believe the magnetic head has to float over the surface using some gas, helium allows it to get closer than regular air so it can read/write at higher density?
If it becomes a vacuum or replaced by air, helium drives will fail.
If it becomes a vacuum or replaced by air, helium drives will fail.
I don't trust any spinning rust for a decade, but I suppose a pre-helium model stored in good, stable conditions should still spin up in a decade.
> Helium atom is too small and leaks through everything, eventually.
Suppose the drive were encased in solid hydrogen? Hydrogen freezes at 14 K and helium boils at 4 K so there's a 10 K range where you could have both solid hydrogen and gaseous helium.
Hydrogen atoms are bigger than helium atoms, but what matters is the gaps between the hydrogen in the solid. I was unable with a bit of Googling to find out anything about the physical structure of solid hydrogen.
Suppose the drive were encased in solid hydrogen? Hydrogen freezes at 14 K and helium boils at 4 K so there's a 10 K range where you could have both solid hydrogen and gaseous helium.
Hydrogen atoms are bigger than helium atoms, but what matters is the gaps between the hydrogen in the solid. I was unable with a bit of Googling to find out anything about the physical structure of solid hydrogen.
I wonder what the numbers need to look like to replace the remaining 4TB pods with 16TB pods.
Yev from Backblaze here -> That's a factor of time and power! The 16TB drives consume more power so that's part of the calculation when we swap from the 4TBs, but we are monitoring them b/c we certainly want to avoid cluster failures and have what we call "rolling migration" projects going on all the time where we perpetually migration hard drives and hardware based on durability projections, power balancing, physical capacity, etc...
I have a theory that solar flares are the cause of some hard drive failures would be interesting to see if a few lead shielded cases would reduce the number of failures. I used to manage a large fleet of computers and anytime we got radio interference from solar flares we would have 3-5 hard drive failures that day.
Any sufficiently large cluster is effectively a cosmic ray detector with terrible sensitivity.
What were the failure modes? Was it corrupted data or were the drives permanently fried?
Corrupt data that would compromise the Operating systems, these were Dell computers with multiple different branded hard drives they would have us run their hardware diagnostic tool that would put them in the range to receive a free replacements. We didn't have to send back the old ones under the contract we had with them they would still work when reformatted but were less reliable after that.
So far I always assumed that, when talking about HDDs failing rates, they where considering the typical mechanical failure. I never considered that they could declare a failure due to some corrupted data, although it would be reasonable for a datacenter to do so.
Mechanical failures were more prevalent in my experience in 90s, most of the recent stuff is usually see are controller failures. I rarely hear any head crash clicking like the old days
If you didn't disable the write cache on those drives, flares could have caused bit flips in the cache memory before it was flushed to disk.
If you're struggling to pick a drive, maybe the best approach is to find a drive that meets your needs from a maker that has a solid warranty program. With a good backup strategy, the maker of the drive may not matter as much.
Anyone have experience using their s3 drop in replacement at scale?
I have single digit TB in it, and my synology HyperBackups fail extremely infrequently. (I'm not willing to attribute the failures to their S3 implementation, since our ISP kind of sucks.)
Anyway, I haven't seen any apparent data loss over the last few years. I'm considering doing a full restore, just for the heck of it. (Especially since this article convinced me I should start replacing the aging drives in my NAS!)
Anyway, I haven't seen any apparent data loss over the last few years. I'm considering doing a full restore, just for the heck of it. (Especially since this article convinced me I should start replacing the aging drives in my NAS!)
HyperBackup is extremely disappointing.
At no point has it risen above 1MB/s when backing up to S3 (Backblaze) when other methods routinely saturate my upload (40Mb/s)
At no point has it risen above 1MB/s when backing up to S3 (Backblaze) when other methods routinely saturate my upload (40Mb/s)
My only experience was moving data from a b2 to an s3. While there were some inefficiencies with the workflow, it went as well as could be hoped for when cross chatting between cloud vendors.
Installing their linux app was out of bounds of normal procedures, but it be what it b2 <hangsHeadInShame>
Installing their linux app was out of bounds of normal procedures, but it be what it b2 <hangsHeadInShame>
b2 or not b2, is that the question?
For those that are wondering, 2,699,664 TiB (~2700PiB or ~2.7EiB).
(I've assumed TiB over TB given they are the sizes reported by the drive manufacturer.)
(I've assumed TiB over TB given they are the sizes reported by the drive manufacturer.)
This means that these stats may not be a very meaningful indication when purchasing a few drives from a retailer.
Never the less, the world is full of situations where you have to make choices with insufficient data. I'm still going to prefer to avoid Seagate hard drives where practical.