Backblaze's 6 TB Hard Drive Face-Off

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.

Comments

Meaningless

[Anonymous Coward]

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. 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.

Re:Meaningless

[sribe]

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

[Sarten-X]

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

[brianwski]

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> 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".

Re:Meaningless

[rthille]

Well, there was a google paper about drive failures a few years back, but I don't think they named names...

Re:Meaningless

[NatasRevol]

Well, retail at the 10,000 drive order level :-)

Re:Meaningless

[greg1104]

In Google's big paper on drive reliability, 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 better deal on drives...have you considered that it's because you're not playing the big commercial buyer secrecy game? The best deal isn't necessarily the one you get if people are worried you're going to rat them out as a bad vendor. It's often the buddy who watches out for them that companies want to do large amounts of business with.

Re:Meaningless

[brianwski]

> retail at the 10,000 drive order level

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!!

Re:Meaningless

[brianwski]

> I'm surprised Backblaze has published so much without getting into lawsuit trouble already.

Hopefully "the truth" is a valid defense? :-) Plus I think the drive companies are aware of the "Streisand effect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and don't want to call even more attention to the fact that every hard drive is fully expected to fail eventually.

Re:Meaningless

[plover]

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.

Re:Meaningless

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak to one of the distributor's sales animals, er, people.

Re:Meaningless

[blahplusplus]

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...

Re:Meaningless

[I4ko]

Well, don't keep the lawyers hungry. They have families to feed too.

Re:Meaningless

[greg1104]

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. 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 sort of information without passing it through legal counsel first to figure it out. And that overhead influences why those companies just don't bother.

The most common reasonable criticism of Backblaze's reports I've seen is that the drives are not being used in their intended environment. I would not want to be part of a legal defense where I had to legally prove the data originating from that use case is strictly factual commentary about the product.

Re:Meaningless

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you totally need more drives for another reason-- rotational vibration.

If you're going to have a shelf of 45 drives, you need to test it with all 45 drives in and doing an expected IO pattern. Because insufficient damping / lack of seek rate limiting has resulted in unexpected performance decrease in the past. This was a huge problem with early generation NAS and SAN, sometimes resulting in 2 orders of magnitude performance degradation under some workloads.

Re:Meaningless

[Sarten-X]

"Research" sounds too official, more like "observations in our environment"

Step #1 of real science.

Re:Meaningless

[FacePlant]

You might be shocked (shocked I tell you ) at how capricious a lot of those decisions are.

Re:Meaningless

[Culture20]

"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

[Anonymous Coward]

I would not want to be part of a legal defense where I had to legally prove the data originating from that use case is strictly factual commentary about the product.

Please stop spreading FUD.

If you publish data on your competitors, that's always highly suspicious. But what you are saying doesn't make any sense - "legally prove", what does that even mean? You're liable if you spread misinformation.

Re:Meaningless

[gweihir]

You seem to have trouble understanding statistics or reading plain text. All the information you are missing was actually there.

Re:Meaningless

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't. In fact, Google's White paper (which I printed out and keep on my desk since I work in the file server world) has them mention that they explicitly wouldn't release that information when the published it (they didn't mention this in the document itself). I wish they would, but I'd bet there's too much potential for legal problems and Google is just covering their own butts. Backblaze on the other hand, might not be a target that is worth suing, and the top brass at Backblaze just doesn't consider it something to worry about. I seem to remember something about it being mentioned that tracking it down to model and brand wasn't worth the effort as there were too many other variables that would make the comparison invalid (but don't quote me).

For all we know Backblaze takes off and grows massively in 2015 and the next bit of info that Backblaze releases to the public is sanitized of brands and models.

The white paper for anyone that hasn't seen it: http://static.googleuserconten...

Posting anonymously as my name is too well known and I don't want the fact that "I" am a source of info to dissuade the bigger topic.

Re:Meaningless

[thegarbz]

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 me how their harddrives are not sitting in their "intended environment" when they are in a fixed rack serving up data, being kept in stable environmental conditions.

Personally I think the criticism is bullshit.

Re:Meaningless

[greg1104]

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.

Re:Meaningless

[dargaud]

I always wondered if Google and other huge outfits get prototype drives well ahead of the market. Those 20Tb drives have to be tested somewhere before they are introduced next year, right ?

Re:Meaningless

[strikethree]

First, let me say thank you for publishing this information.

Second, the reason nobody else shares information is: Information is power. Power shared is power lost.

I forget who did that quote originally. Some claim it is from the Art of War.

Regardless, any power "lost" is surely gained back in spades with good will. You guys rock. :)

Re:Meaningless

[thegarbz]

"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 via rubber grommets?
finally:
How do 1-5 disks placed horizontally next to each other or double stacked compared to drives mounted vertically and held in place with an anti-vibration sleeve such as the one used by Backblaze which they posted gave them a measurable performance improvement?

Even some braindead lawyer could point out the difference between a direct measurable specification and the completely subjective "NAS with 1-5 disks"
And as a side note Backblaze see no reliability differences between their consumer and enterprise grade drives, of which they have several thousand.

Re:Meaningless

[greg1104]

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 is that they are not using the consumer drives in anything like a consumer environment. That means using their results as a commentary on what people will see in the broader consumer system market is extrapolation, with the obvious risks that come along with it.

For example, "Backblaze sees no reliability differences between their consumer and enterprise grade drives" is a fact. Saying "there is no reliability differences between consumer and enterprise grade drives" is an invalid extrapolation of that data.

Using your example, what if one of the consumer drive models has a serious vibration issue, and Backblaze's anti-vibration sleeve makes it wildly more reliable than it would otherwise be? That would make their statistics pretty worthless for consumers who don't have one of those sleeves. Home users might actually see better reliability with one of the enterprise drives that include anti-vibration technology in that case. That's all I was saying here--that you can't just assume their numbers will translate into other environments.

Re:Meaningless

[brianwski]

> 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.

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

[blahplusplus]

There's also steam:

http://store.steampowered.com/...

Re:Meaningless

[Anonymous Coward]

By coininky-dinkyince, I just bought 3 mini-itx pc cases that arrived from B&H photo (my first purchase there). I had trouble finding them elsewhere in stock and they came through.

Re:Meaningless

[thegarbz]

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 capacity in an elevator in persons without defining what a person actually weighs, which is also why it's not legal to write just the number of persons on the load capacity.

The reality is their pods will have wildly different vibration characteristics and I say this as a person who has has spent the best part of the last 4 years working in industrial vibration monitoring. No two machines vibrate alike regardless of what environment you put them in. That's why predictive maintenance is not done based on absolutes but relative measurements. It is very possible that one of Backblaze's pods will vibrate itself to all crap, while another will experience even less vibration than a single drive PC.

But what's extremely clear is that they are not using the consumer drives in anything like a consumer environment.

Really? Because I keep my harddrives in a metal box with fans and sources of heat. Don't you?

For example, "Backblaze sees no reliability differences between their consumer and enterprise grade drives" is a fact. Saying "there is no reliability differences between consumer and enterprise grade drives" is an invalid extrapolation of that data.

You're right. If you extrapolated the data properly you're saying that consumer drives are far more reliable than enterprise drives given that Backblaze sees no difference while running the enterprise drives within spec and the consumer drives outside of your mythical spec. I never thought about it that way.

Using your example, what if one of the consumer drive models has a serious vibration issue, and Backblaze's anti-vibration sleeve makes it wildly more reliable than it would otherwise be? That would make their statistics pretty worthless for consumers who don't have one of those sleeves.

This is true but in any case you're stretching here and moving the goalposts of the argument. The original argument was that Backblaze are using drive outside of "spec" and what this mythical "spec" actually means.

I'd be happy to agree with you on random distribution of environmental variables in other circumstances, but lets define those variables first. I propose we define the environment in number of vehicles with a GVM of 18T driving within 80m of the computer. It's about as useful as number of the drives in the array.

Anyway I'm more than happy to follow Backblaze's numbers and translate them into other environments. I'd be even more happier if you gave me some other data to work with. Because if we ignore Backblaze's numbers all we are back to is a 110 years MTBF if used with 1-5 drives in a NAS.

Actually maybe we should correlate it to solar activity. It would probably be more accurate than the manufacturer's useless numbers.

Re:Meaningless

[dafradu]

Steam does this. http://store.steampowered.com/...

Re:Meaningless?

[BenJeremy]

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.

Long story short (ad-less)

[hcs_$reboot]

- Initial reliability (how many drives failed) – No failures.
- 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.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[chrysrobyn]

Those of us behind corporate firewalls thank you.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[Solandri]

- Energy Use â" 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 â" Edge to Western Digital, by a little over 1 TB per day on average.

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, or 1.2 TB/platter. It has 64MB cache.

The Seagate drives were the STBD6000100. It's a 6-platter drive, 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.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[Rich0]

- 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 moving data to SSD when it is in use. I just don't know how well-supported that is in Windows. I think it has the equivalent of a symbolic link.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[MightyYar]

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 only have a few users on the PC, but can get very tedious with multiple users.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[greg1104]

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.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[Mkx]

- Energy Use â" 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 â" Edge to Western Digital, by a little over 1 TB per day on average.

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.

How about some elementary arithmetics instead?

1TB of data per day on average boils down to neighbourhood of 11.5MB per second. I doubt that you are currently able to purchase a hard drive that can't sustain writes at several times higher speed. And that's single drive write performance while beforementioned 1TB data did hit whole Pod and was presumably spread over all of drives in the Pod. Hence the figure 1TB daily data is not showing any kind of performance limits ...

More likely the meaning of 1TB daily data was that both test pods got hit by similar amount of data which is not showing the speed difference but rather showing that drives were not idle and thus the nil failure rate was a result which can be achieved under moderate load (things do tend to break under load more often).

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[Jahoda]

This is great information you've pulled together. I'd like to add that 5900 RPM is a common Seagate speed - and if the drive actually were 7200 RPM, it is likely based on past products in the market that it would be much more expensive than it currently is. Additionally, Seagate would miss no opportunity to advertise 7200 RPM on its website.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[sshir]

I seriously doubt that difference in load is due to drive speed, at least not directly. Their pods are connected by slow (1Gb?) Ethernet. My guess is that there is a sort of interference effect between disk rotation speed, network data rate, buffer sizes, tcp window size etc.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[Mkx]

Do the maths. You can get 1TB 7200 RPM drive for ... say 60$. 1TB SSD costs you from 350$ upwards (that's at newegg's). The power consumption of typical HDD is around 6W and depending on electricity rate (at my place it's around 25c/kWh) it takes around 22 years to burn enough electricity to cover the drive price difference. And with larger single drive sizes this comparison gets even worse for SSD.

The only reason to ditch HDDs in favour of SSDs is performance. If you only use your data at low speed (such as streaming single Blu-ray video at 54Mbps), any semi-modern HDD will do.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[Blaskowicz]

\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.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[Rich0]

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.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[by (1706743)]

I think the 1TB/day was additional data transferred, not total.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[richy freeway]

Or even easier, just cut and paste the directories to where you want them and Windows takes care of updating the locations.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[MightyYar]

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.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[MightyYar]

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 :)

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[Mkx]

I think the 1TB/day was additional data transferred, not total.

Yup, you're right, they've been hit by overwhelming 8 TB/day. The point (still true) is that that amount of data was hadled by whole pod with cumulative data throughput of at least 350 TB / day. And that, while not large enough to hold 8 TB data, any of those drives is capable of such daily average data rate, thus the difference in average datarate thrown at pods of different HDDs is not showing the difference in performance of those drives at all.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[damnbunni]

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 particular, benefits from fast seek times; the framerate is visibly better on an SSD, particularly when riding a horse.)

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[Rich0]

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 storage). For pure desktop use you could easily get by with a 64GB SSD or maybe even 32GB.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[ElderKorean]

For my desktop 'games' machine - I went the path of booting from a normal 500Gb HDD, that also had a partition for media.

I had a 250Gb SSD used for just games only - LotRO, Firefall.& all steam (easy enough to move the library to be on the SSD)

Turn on PC, go make cuppa, return and check any updates done, play games from the fast...

Brought some 120Gb SSD as early Christmas present for myself to replace that boot HDD and another,

Also found that a Windows 8.1 touch laptop with only 2Gb memory is perfectly fine with an SSD - was forever swapping but usable with HDD.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[richy freeway]

Yeah good point worth making. This is for moving My Pictures, My Documents, etc. Moving the content of C:\users\whoever, NOT for moving the directory c:\users

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[cthulhu11]

Let's remember that the on-disk volatile cache is generally disabled by the factory. Enabling it exposes one to data corruption / loss if power is lost. I don't remember from BB's articles whether they take the risk.

Re:Long story short (ad-less)

[RockDoctor]

Further concluding data :

Victory is Fleeting

Today the Western Digital hard drives are first in line to be our choice for 6 TB drives. Of course, we just ordered 45 HGST 8 TB Helium hard drives for testing. Their unit price is still a [bit?] too high for cost effective deployment, but [...] it could be just a matter of time. In fact, Seagate is now beginning to ship their 8 TB shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard drives for a reported $260 a drive. Availability is spotty at the moment, but is certain to improve over the coming months.

Or, to the man on the Clapham omnibus, they're much of a much-ness.

Man, am I old ...

[gstoddart]

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear hear.. I remember the old flippy disks too.. Now get off my lawn

Re:Man, am I old ...

[dowens81625]

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Jason Levine]

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[geekoid]

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[geekmux]

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.

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[dowens81625]

in the end we will all be "rm -rf yourlife"

Re:Man, am I old ...

[tibit]

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[GNious]

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're supposed to have all those pictures developed as slides and have pre-loaded carousels for when family comes to visit, and all your family videos should be on VHS!

You're doing it wrong, AND you're on my lawn!

Re:Man, am I old ...

[brianwski]

> recreational photos take 100 GBytes per month

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[tibit]

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 ...

[fgodfrey]

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 to understand about that?

Yeah, I could spend hours paring down my audio collection. I could delete the musical recordings, eliminate duplicates, and throw away shows I'm likely to never revisit. My wife could delete most of her pictures (ones that were out of focus, test shots, ones that she doesn't like for some reason). My parents could buy DVDs (which are simply a less convenient form of storage). But why would any of us do this? I occasionally get asked to remix songs and I reuse sound effects from shows sometimes. My wife goes back and looks at shots or may change her mind about what she wants to keep.

When you can fit 8TB on something the size of a medium book, why wouldn't you keep stuff you might use again?

Re:Man, am I old ...

[fgodfrey]

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 hitting 100GB/month. All depends on whether this guy's wife is as obsessive about her "recreation" as my wife and I are....

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us actually use DSLR's or other good cameras and save as RAW. Not everyone wants nasty jpg compression.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Recreational photography and those data rates probably mean DSLR and raw image formats. Some people experience one time that they wished for raw data to reprocess the exposure, and compensate by taking raw from that moment on "just in case". People can overreact to the idea of loss by placing an extremely high value on retaining it. Unfortunately, they don't always internalize the opportunity cost of holding on to everything. It creeps up slowly and they forget what other possibility even exists.

I think someone up-thread called it: Digital hoarding just doesn't have the same stigma as physical hoarding. I encouraged an older relative of mine to convert physical hoarding into digital, since it was less intrusive for everyone else. I hauled away his absurd array of VCRs and stacks of VHS tapes, replacing it with a single media PC that could act like a DVR and have a bunch of hard disks in it in a software RAID. Over the years, I've had to upgrade the disks a few times for him, since he is unwilling to delete anything after he watches it. But, I suspect this solution will keep pace until he dies and we send it all to the scrap yard.

It's funny. I develop data management techniques for researchers who have similar pack-rat behaviors. My own personal trend has been to accumulate data at a lower rate, at least relative to the rate of technical improvements. I used to require RAID to have enough storage with commodity disks, but now a single disk is way larger than necessary and I only use RAID for its reliability benefits. I still wonder if it is because technology has reached my personal needs, or if I've learned to place less value on data as I've grown older.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[rudy_wayne]

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think I found how many KB a 60 / 90 or 110 minute Sony audiotape would hold. If anyone remembers please post.

According to Wikipedia, each side of a 90 minute casette could hold about 660KB. I used to employ them for storage on a Commodore PET, back in the pre-IBM-PC days. Of course, a dedicated cassette could hold many MB, but they weren't designed to hold audio.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[plover]

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 discard photos?

Re:Man, am I old ...

[DarkOx]

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 music library at about 120GB. Its easy to back that all up, and I can find anything that is important quickly.

I know lots of people with TBs of stuff, and with a few exceptions where they are working with lots of raw video etc, none of them have a clue what they have. They don't do backups because the volumes are to large, etc. Mostly their lives are worse for having it. My online storage is a raid array of SSDs, I wait for nothing, not even writes ( lots of cache ). Their systems grind away sorting through a fragmented mess of junk on disk. I honestly don't get it.

Now I know the gamers might need a few hundred more GBs than I do for content; but I agree with you its really suspect when Joe Typical User is telling you he needs 6TB for anything. I would say chances are he is doing something not well considered.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It was Dr. Demento, and the speed was ~300bps.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[the_B0fh]

Uh, if I remember correctly, PCs used both sides of the disk. Apple ][s did not.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[DarkOx]

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, especially when the same thing exists for the day before and after.

Why not take all the pictures and at the end of the day, trip, event, maybe week, get rid the ~90% you will never want?

Honestly I can't understand having that quantity of pictures. The reason you take them is so you can look back on them, but with so many how can you ever find something really worth looking back at?

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Archangel Michael]

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Pascoea]

My wife and I took over 7000 pictures on our honeymoon (which lasted about a month)

You guys took about 15 pictures/hour on your honeymoon? (assuming 8 hours/day of sleep)

When did you guys find time to fuck?

Re:Man, am I old ...

[jandrese]

At the risk of being unable to read any of the tapes you made with the old misaligned head. It's saying something when the horribly brain damaged 1541 disk drive for the C=64 was considered a major step up from the other options.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped taking pictures completely a few years back when I realized that even when just taking a handful at the 'strategic' moments, I was 'missing' the most important and interesting moments of the experience. Now I just immerse myself in the experience with no distractions.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[sconeu]

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....

Re:Man, am I old ...

[geekmux]

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 wrote the book on selfies. Literally.

I guess the "hard" part to understand here is you accepting the fact that your usage profile only represents 0.001% of society.

And my original point still stands regarding data hoarding. No one is going to sort through terabytes of data when you die. No one.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[geekmux]

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[gstoddart]

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 definitely punched floppies to get extra capacity. That I can guarantee you.

So, you remember what you remember, and I'll remember what I do.

At the time, owning one of those punches was kind of a geek badge of honor when it wasn't cool at all to be a geek. :-P

Re:Man, am I old ...

[jabuzz]

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It may not address the underlying issue, but if you have a free warehouse to keep crap in, it certainly eliminates most of the symptoms of hoarding. Hoarders tend to be (or have been) poor. Lots of concentration camp survivors developed that habit too. They keep that PoS "free" tv because it was once worth more than they could have put together and someone might pay $5 for it someday and that $5 could mean eating or not eating. The second order effects - that they are essentially paying $5/yr to store it in their own closet is harder to see for them.

I bet if you go up to anyone on that show and offer them $25k for all their crap on the spot and 90% will take it. The rest have bigger issues.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[fgodfrey]

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.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[the_B0fh]

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)

Re: Man, am I old ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hard platter disks...just sayin'

Re:Man, am I old ...

[nedlohs]

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?

Re: Man, am I old ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It was roughly 100 kB per 30 minuters of tape for the original encoding, or about 10 times that with "turbo"

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Chewbacon]

I first had an 80 meg hard drive and had no idea what that meant. Then after a couple years of school, I filled it up with documents and basic programs. Upgraded to a 400meg hard disk with windows 3.11 and thought I'd never run out of space. Then I learned what doom, wolfenstein, and a bunch of other games was and I ran out of space. Then a ginormous 4gb disk came out and I bought one. Dude, I'll NEVER run out of space! Then MP3s went on the rise and oops... out of space. The Zip disk gave me some wiggle room, and I still have one for nostalgia. 19.2 gig quantum Bigfoot. Pirated divx movies and napster/kazaa/limewire clogged that one up. 500gb drive filled with mountains of digital pictures and home videos. Finally 1tb seems livable... for now. But then it comes to backing it up and hosting my digital media on my media server: 4tb and its holding its own... for now. :)

These upgrades are getting less and less frequent... we've come a long way, baby!

Re:Man, am I old ...

[antdude]

I agree. It is hard to keep up too since I am an old fart. :/ I wonder what it would be like in 30 years.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[fgodfrey]

I didn't say never look at them, I said never remove the extra photos from your Lightroom catalog, find the files on disk, delete them, and hope you didn't accidentally delete IMG_8192.JPG instead of IMG_8191.JPG. And yes, it *is* easier to just store them than to do that. If hard drive sizes stop increasing, or the photo cataloging software gets better, that may change. In the mean time, the disk space is cheaper and easier than the time to deal with it.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[thegarbz]

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.

As is drawing conclusions based on no actual use data. Do you climb into the cage with the lions and participate? Or take photos of them? Do you take photos of a sleeping baby, or go and poke it awake so it can cry in your face?

Participation has it's place. Many of the places I take my camera do not require, warrant, or even allow participation.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[suutar]

Disk is cheap. Time is valuable. Whether it's more valuable to you than disk is your call. I personally think I'd rather spend my weekend doing other stuff than curate my photos. Maybe it's lazy, maybe it's prioritizing my time. Again, subjective call. (Personally, I think it's about 50/50 :)

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Anonymous Coward]

When she shoots kids, it's 10 shots per second

Ah, the US folklore... I guess they pry her machine gun from their cold, dead fingers...

Re:Man, am I old ...

[hAckz0r]

My first PC still had the first model 64kb motherboard, and the cassete IO interface, but instead I splurged to install dual 180k single sided floppies and the first 16 color monitor. When hard drives became available I bought one of the first 5MB hd directly from IBM before anyone knew they existed, and it took me the better part of the year to figure out how to do the low level format it needed to be useable. BIOS support? Well, why do they call these the good old days?

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Archangel Michael]

One picture of a sleeping baby is different from 10,000 pictures of said baby sleeping. One is memorial, the other is obsession.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I look forward to the day where I can have an egg-sized flying camera drone hover over my shoulder so I can have both.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[gzuckier]

I remember spending 2 grand for a full size AT expansion board which was filled with a giant 256k of ram.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[tibit]

Of course no one is gonna sort through this, because it won't be necessary. This is raw data. The stuff that goes into iPhoto is a small fraction of it. The library sits there because I can still afford to pay for the hard drives :)

The funniest thing is that such amount of data is surprisingly not hard to generate. All that my wife does is depress the shutter and chase the kids here and there. She isn't a professional, but she did notice that she can capture some unique and serendipitous pics that way. Yeah, 99.99% of them are trash, but without them the 0.01% wouldn't even be possible. She loves the newfangled absurdly fast SD cards, of course. She *hates* slow cameras.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[thegarbz]

Allow me to quote myself:

is completely void of meaning

As is drawing conclusions based on no actual use data.

Yet somehow you continue down the no data path and assume everyone takes 10000 pictures of the same baby sleeping? Have you considered a career in upper management?

Re:Man, am I old ...

[omnichad]

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.

Storage is cheap and sometimes you just never get around to paring it. You're right that it's all about the "one" shot for most people.

Re:Man, am I old ...

[omnichad]

I copy the contents of all of my DVD and Blu-Ray movies to a RAID. Since storage is (relatively) cheap, I can shrink my physical hoarding to the space those discs take up in a binder in a closet and still watch my movies on-demand.

It's true that I own many movies that I may never watch again, but I'm paying for the opportunity to watch it whenever I want. Netflix doesn't even offer that level of custom content. It's a personalized Netflix.

Re:Meaningless?

[Anonymous Coward]

The segate drives being slower probably have to do with the SMR they are using? As each write has an amplification effect on the surrounding bits?

Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an article driven by the marketing team to drive sales. Take it for what it is....

Re:Marketing

[YutakaFrog]

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!

Re:Marketing

[brianwski]

Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Backblaze.

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:Marketing

[greg1104]

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:Marketing

[Overzeetop]

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:Marketing

[Anonymous Psychopath]

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:Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is backed up to external USB drive.
External USB drive is pluggd into Windows box
Windows box is automatcally backed up to BackBlaze.

What I've wondered about, is how BackBlaze will respond if/when somebody uses their own homebuilt 270TB Pod as an external drive for BackBlaze to backup.

Backups are not secure

[Anonymous Coward]

Their backup scheme require them to have access to your private key (the one you encrypted your backup with). They are a US company. Enough said.

Re:Backups are not secure

[jsepeta]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of your private key to your backups as being similar to your password for your bank account. How many people and/or companies should you give that out to? In fact, the private key to your backups may be protecting sensitive information worth more than a personal bank account.

"They are a US company". That makes me suspicious enough not to store unencrypted data on their servers or even to store encrypted data for which they hold the key to.

Re:Backups are not secure

[brianwski]

> Their backup scheme require them to have access to your private key (the one you encrypted your backup with).

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:Backups are not secure

[Anonymous Coward]

The Backblaze website says:

"To decrypt your data, you are required to enter your passphrase on our secure website. When you do so, it is passed over an encrypted connection to our datacenter where it is used to decrypt your private key, which in turn is used to decrypt your data."

That's just smoke and mirrors. Private key should never be given to anybody. That's why they are called "private" keys. Private keys (stored on their owner's PC where they should be) are still encrypted with passphrases in case the PC is hacked. That's how important keeping the private key completely private is.

Re:Backups are not secure

[greg1104]

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:Backups are not secure

[Anonymous Coward]

" Without that passphrase, nobody will ever retrieve your data, not you, not the US government, not the NSA, NOBODY. "

That is patently false and you know it.

TRIGGER

Re:Backups are not secure

[Overzeetop]

"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 you are getting your data is going to be pretty darned near zero *unless* you happen to be the target of an investigation. If you are, I would suggest that you pay the extra money for something like SpiderOak, where all the encrypt/decrypt is done locally. Though, to be honest, if you're going to be watched by the Feds, a USB drive and a good fire safe is probably a better solution for backing up your "sensitive" data.

Re:Backups are not secure

[brianwski]

> Private keys (stored on their owner's PC where they should be) are still encrypted
> 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 yet the company with your backup data does not have the private key either. In essence that is what Backblaze does, just in an "easy to use" way. We store the private encryption keys on one particular server, completely separate from your data. The data is all on "pods". Is it as secure? I don't think anybody can claim 100 % security, we do the very very best job we can.

I leave you with the following thought -> if you would use encryption (like TrueCrypt) on your most sensitive data, *THEN* back up the TrueCrypt image to Backblaze, even if Backblaze wanted to read your data or if the NSA put their processing power on it and cracked your passphrase, they would have nothing, because you encrypted it BEFORE it was encrypted by Backblaze and sent through HTTPS to our servers. Maybe that would allow you to sleep soundly at night?

Re:Backups are not secure

[jandrese]

This is really not a good approach to using public key crypto. The private key shouldn't be on the servers, it should be on the client. I know it's a pain to handle per-file backups and especially deltas when everything is encrypted, but that's the tradeoff for proper security. In fact there's really no need for expensive public key crypto here at all. Just have the client use a cheapish symmetric key (AES256 perhaps) and send only encrypted data to the servers. There's no need at all for the servers to ever have the data in the clear.

Re:Backups are not secure

[Blaskowicz]

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:Backups are not secure

[brianwski]

> Just have the client use a cheapish symmetric key (AES256 perhaps)

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 this flow, it is used in several encrypted filesystems because it's a great design.) This was it is FAST (symmetric AES) plus has the total awesomeness of pub/private keys and all they imply (the idea that you can encrypt data with the public key that nobody listening can decrypt because they don't have the private key is really quite powerful).

We then use HTTPS to post this data from your laptop to our datacenter. From time to time this "double encryption" of both encrypting on the client and sending the already encrypted data through HTTPS anyway has helped keep our customers safe when HTTPS has been broken for a little while.

Re:Backups are not secure

[geekyMD]

I have actually considered the truecrypt container backup but I was unclear that Backblaze supported incremental backups. I was under the impression that each time a file is backed up the entire file is re-uploaded. Is a diff process used instead rather than re-uploading 1Gb every time a text file within the truecrypt container is changed? How do you handle the issue that many truecrypt volumes do not update their access and modified timestamps on files to be aware that changes have been made?

Thanks for all the responses to this post. While your drive observations are perhaps unique to your setup they still have information to offer the rest of us.

Re:Backups are not secure

[suutar]

seems like it should be possible for backblaze to store whatever encrypted data (including the PEM file) without the passkey that can open the PEM file ever entering their system. Of course, then my client has to do all the encryption/decryption, but then again, if I care whether the passkey leaves my system I'm probably willing to pay that price.

Of course, it's entirely possible that that's exactly how it's handled when using a non-web client... in which case I would just avoid the website.

Re:Backups are not secure

[brianwski]

> unclear that Backblaze supported incremental backups

Backblaze does support incremental backups, but it is a fairly simplistic incremental. For any file less than 30 MBytes there are no partial files, we just push a whole new copy to a whole new location in our datacenter. For any file more than 30 MBytes, we break the file into 10 MByte "chunks" and push each individual chunk if that chunk has changed. So the WORST thing you can do is prepend a single byte to the large file - this essentially causes every single 10 MByte chunk to change (slide to the right?) and so we have to retransmit the entire thing.

For a lot of programs dealing with large files, they tend to append bytes to the end of their file formats, which works great. If it is an entire bootable computer image, a lot of stuff will probably not move around (like huge swaths of binaries sitting in that computer image) and a lot of stuff WILL move around that will "accidentally" be backed up.

One final hint: by default TrueCrypt specifically thinks changing the modification time is "leaking information". Make sure you check the checkbox that when TrueCrypt changes the image, it needs to also update the last modified time. Backblaze uses that as a hint to go examine every byte in the file to see if it should be retransmitted.

Re:Backups are not secure

[stub667]

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.

I see it as a requirement rather than a flaw. If my data can be decripted after I have lost my key, then other people had copies of my key. It is a well known and documented fact that we can't trust everyone with access to the other copies of my key.

You never see my requirements or feature requests or responses on user serveys, or those from people who ask me for help, because your product doesn't meet my needs and gets discounted in the first round (along with almost all of your competitors).

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 yet the company with your backup data does not have the private key either. In essence that is what Backblaze does, just in an "easy to use" way. We store the private encryption keys on one particular server, completely separate from your data. The data is all on "pods". Is it as secure? I don't think anybody can claim 100 % security, we do the very very best job we can.
 

Yes, the escrow solution has exactly the sames flaw as Backblaze's model. Security is fundamentally flawed as soon as users lose control of their key. All that effort ensuring keys are never writen to disk provides some protection against hackers, but can be completely bypassed by authority. The list of people and organizations that can gain or already have such authority is always surprisingly large. You are doing the very very best job you can for the model you have chosen to implement.

Fixing key loss problems requires guiding or ensuring that the user to keeps copies of their key. Maybe you can even offer to keep a copy for nieve users, or make some pocket money selling keyfobs, but if you start from the position of compromiable keys you can't support people with a healthy dose of paranoia. And that is becoming more and more of us. We are stuck with encrypting *before* we use your service, which makes your service less usable and less attractive.

I always find it sad when people advocate blacklists to protect their sensitive data. 'Encrypt your most sensitive data first'. It doesn't work, as it assumes you know what your most sensitive data actually is and don't make mistakes. You need to protect *all* your data by default, and open up data you determine to be not sensitive when necessary ('Share this photo with friends', 'Sync with Contacts').

Re:Backups are not secure

[stub667]

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)

If the keys are encrypted, maybe. The bank is using this to store bills and bank statements. This storage doesn't need to be secure, it just needs to be more secure than your letter box. The bank doesn't need to keep the storage private from its employees, as its employees already have access to your bank statements and bills. About the worst thing you could upload there is your internet or phone banking password in cleartext, as it would be visible to exactly the people who know how to best exploit it.

Re:Backups are not secure

[Blaskowicz]

It is advertised as a secure place to store files (a "digital safe") and I'm pretty sure the bank is unable to access the files.
The password is weak, though (but at least minimally protected against key loggers : you click on numbers whose order was scrambled). That makes it fail slashdotian standards.

Just noise

[dhaen]

Isn't this the company who gave Seagate a a hard time over the reliability that they had WITH THIER SAMPLE? I have no reliability issues with Seagate compared with several other suppliers (WITH MY SAMPLE).

Re:Just noise

[Holmwood]

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:Just noise

[the_B0fh]

No no no! Any random Internet user's personal experience trumps any data you have!

Re:Just noise

[EmagGeek]

I have a 125% failure rate for Seagate drives (i.e. 100% of the 12 I bought for my home server and 25% of the warranty replacements have failed). Model number ST3000DM001

1mhz 6502

[mveloso]

Yeah, I remember when 1mhz was fast.

Re:1mhz 6502

[hcs_$reboot]

Loved the 6502.

Re:1mhz 6502

[psergiu]

3.5 Mhz Z80 Sinclair Spectrum FTW !
Megahurtz Powah !!!

Re:1mhz 6502

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft should limit all there company computers to 1 Mhz, so Windows will run at a reasonable speed for everyone else.

Re:Meaningless?

[NatasRevol]

caching isn't a hard concept.

360K already double-sided

[crow]

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.

Re:360K already double-sided

[iggymanz]

wrong, there was also 80 cylinder, 96 TPI, single sided, double density, 360Kb disk

Re:360K already double-sided

[iggymanz]

http://www.3480-3590-data-conv...

Re:360K already double-sided

[jandrese]

You could punch a hole to turn a double-density floppy into a high density floppy, at least with the 3.5" floppies. It worked the few times I tried it but the need for antics like that faded pretty quickly as technology marched on.

Re:360K already double-sided

[crow]

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.

80 cylinder, 96 TPI

This was the second type of 5.25" drive made, and the least popular (and known) of the three types of drives. These double the capacity of the original drive by doubling the number of cylinders (tracks) from 40 to 80. They use the same media as the the 40 cylinder 48 TPI drives, but it is certified (tested) on all 80 tracks, as opposed to the standard disks which were only certified at 40 tracks.

These drives were never common on PCs, although DEC used a single sided version called the RX-50, in the DECMate word-processor, the DEC Rainbow and several other DEC computers, including the PDP-11 and the VAX.

Other than the DEC RX-50, these drives were almost always double sided, and recorded in double density MFM. They had a capacity of around 720K. Like the 40 track drives, they used 300oe media, and the drive rotates at 300 RPM

So apart from one very rare example, if you're talking 5.25" disk floppies, 360K meant double-sided. I expect the vast majority of people cutting out the notches to flip over their disks were using Apple II, Atari, or Commodore computers. In that realm, 90K was SS/SD and 180K was SS/DD. Most users didn't have double-sided drives until the IBM PC started using 360K DS/DD disks.

Re:360K already double-sided

[angst_ridden_hipster]

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.

Re:360K already double-sided

[iggymanz]

DEC was huge, their floppy drive not really "rare" though if someone's experience only in home/hobby systems of that day they might have missed it

Re:Meaningless?

[greg1104]

Seagate isn't using SMR on the 6TB drives, at least not yet as far as I know. That's rolling out with the 8TB models.

Re:Meaningless?

[the_B0fh]

Are you saying seagate doesn't have caching?

Re:Meaningless?

[aaaaaaargh!]

Nah, they're just slower because they are starting to accumulate errors that in one year from now will lead to a complete failure.

Little more than free advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

Backblaze got itself some free advertising. Well, they only cater for the Windows and Mac crowd. I have myself been CrashPlan instead for a while now, who offer Linux clients and a lower monthly fee. I have no interest in CrashPlan beyond being a satisfied customer; I think they deserve a plug to counter Linux-unfriendly Backblaze's propaganda.

Re:Little more than free advertising

[brianwski]

> counter Linux-unfriendly Backblaze's propaganda

Backblaze employee here. By the way, we're not "Linux-unfriendly", every single last datacenter machine is running Debian, that's like 950 machines! Most laptop customers use Windows or Mac so we did those versions first, and we're trying to get the Linux client finished up, it just got pushed down in priority a few times, but we don't mean it as a slight against Linux.

About CrashPlan - I have ALWAYS liked CrashPlan, and I think they are great and people should certainly consider CrashPlan if it fits their needs. You might also consider Carbonite and Mozy, I think these are all good products with a few tradeoffs here and there. Backblaze isn't perfect for all customers, for example, we don't yet have a Linux client. I believe Mozy has a better small business administration portal than Backblaze has also, if that's what your needs are.

Just a point of clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

The study is not saying the WD drives are faster than the Seagate drives. The study is saying that a Pod of WD drives, with all of its associated electronics and control computers, accepts data at a faster rate than a Pod of Seagate drives.

From the language of the article, if a Pod is "busy" then it passes an incoming block of data to the next Pod. This is really just saying that the Seagate Pods are "busy" more often than the WD pods.

This does not necessarily mean that the drives themselves are slower. It could be caused by anything from the way data is switched through the network to the drives' caching algorithms to a myriad of other things, including how one implements NCQ over another.

Load balancing could affect data storage rates

[Anonymous Coward]

In reference to the data storage rates for the 5400rpm WD drives and the 7200rpm Seagate drives: Did they compensate for their load balancing? e.g. if the WD pod was the first polled and rarely busy, data would tend to be stored there and those drives would fill up faster.

Didn't see that consideration in the article.

Hitachi 6TB

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Since we have a Backblaze staff member here, can I ask why did you guys not test Hitachi's 6TB drives?

Re:Hitachi 6TB

[Anonymous Coward]

Those tested Seagate and WD drives were consumer level drives with prices about half of the helium filled Hitachi enterprise drives.

Re:Meaningless?

[NatasRevol]

I'm saying it has half as much. Which gives worse results.

Re:Meaningless?

[the_B0fh]

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.

Re:Meaningless?

[Culture20]

I hate to say it, but this is probably the correct answer. Every failed write to a sector on the 7200's requires the drives to relocate the data, making the 5400's "faster" to write the complete data if they get fewer write errors.

Re:Meaningless?

[Fweeky]

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.

Re:Meaningless?

[hairyfeet]

Well if what I read on one of the forums (sorry I can't remember which, may have been Tom's) by a person claiming to be a former Seagate employee is true? Seagate suckage makes sense and moreover we now know WHY it happened all of a sudden.

Here is the skinny, according to the insider when Seagate bought Maxtor instead of Seagate making Maxtor better? It brought Seagate down to Maxtor levels. You see Maxtor had these ARM controllers that were dirt cheap to crank out, catch was you had to keep 'em in 5400 RPM drives (and even then they better be well ventilated) because if they got hot 1+1 could equal anything from 1-5 and so the controller would lose its little mind and forget where the end of the drive was and the drive geometry. Of course all the Seagate execs saw was $$$ on how much they'd save on the cost of manufacture so they started using them on ALL Seagate drives and...you know the rest. The reason why you can see a dozen shitty and one good in every batch is that when they run low on the shitty Maxtor chips they will occasionally use some of the more expensive Seagate chips, hence the pearl among the poop.

But after reading that it all made sense, the sudden plummet in quality, why drives below 750GB are good (those chips are based on the old Seagate chips and code) and why we see a good one among the crap, you get lucky on the ARM lotto. It all sadly makes sense, just more short sighted corporate douchebaggery.

Re:Meaningless?

[magarity]

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.

Re:Meaningless?

[NatasRevol]

The one with slower drive speed has more cache (Seagate), making it actually faster.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/...

Re:Meaningless?

[thegarbz]

As much as I like to bash Seagate due to their crappy reliability in my personal experience, TFA states that there were no issues identified in the SMART data between the 6TB drives. One of the metrics they use to determine reliability is SMART 5 Reallocated Sector Count.

Either Seagate's stats are lying or the drive isn't having a problem with failed writes.

But I'm overthinking this. Maybe they are slow because they are just crap.

Re:Meaningless?

[the_B0fh]

Which is why it is interesting the WD drives transfer 1TB more than the Seagates.

Re:Meaningless?

[fisted]

How does caching help bulk write performance?

speeds

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, if only BackBlaze could find a way to get more bandwidth so their shitty service backed up a rate faster than 300KB/sec per client.

Re:speeds

[brianwski]

> BackBlaze could find a way to get more bandwidth so their shitty service backed up a rate faster than 300KB/sec per client

You should absolutely be getting more bandwidth than that, you might contact our support to see what's up? We have students from Universities hitting 100 Mbits/sec upload rates, plus I suspect a few engineers in datacenters are getting even higher. We do not inherently throttle, although we use RAID6 with groups of 15 drives so inherently you are probably rate limited to 1 Gbit/sec by either the 1 Gbit/sec network card in the pod, or ?? which is the disk drive transfer rate.