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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.
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.
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.
John
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...
> 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.