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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.
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.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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!
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.
> I'm surprised Backblaze has published so much without getting into lawsuit trouble already.
:-) 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.
Hopefully "the truth" is a valid defense?
"Research" sounds too official, more like "observations in our environment"
Step #1 of real science.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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.