Slashdot Mirror
For First Three Years, Consumer Hard Drives As Reliable As Enterprise Drives
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.'"
"Enterprise" drives may have longer warranty coverage, so you are essentially just buying an extended warranty that is built into the selling price. This is how water heaters are priced...a 5 year warranty water heater is often identical to a 10 year warranty unit, but the manufacturer has crunched the failure rate numbers and will just wind up replacing a percentage of 10 year models when they start to leak in 8 years.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Sadly no, they are just Intrepid's SSDs
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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 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).
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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...
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
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"?
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.