Going to be screwed over for sticking to policy just like a San Francisco IT guy who caught the bosses new squeeze fooling with the IT security manager's PC after hours, then put in the career ending position of being told to reveal a password in front of people that he was forbidden to reveal a password to. Heads or tails - both lose.
He is currently charged with providing material support to terrorists
Cool, can we charge Senator Peter King with that? He sent money to the IRA to buy semtex explosives from Libya FFS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._King#Support_for_the_IRA How about Oliver North, now one of the people running the NRA, who sent weapons to Hezbolla, including anti-tank weapons that were supposed to be too secret to sold to US allies? It's really funny to hear both of them go on about terrorism as if they had not been enabling it.
Oh that's right, no charges for them, it's just a threat to be used on the little guys.
If advantage can be gained by those applying the label then they are a terrorist. That's how hostage situations get called "terrorism" now among other things.
Expect a lot more of that sort of redefinition even though there is already too much.
Or if it was delivered broken with a built in flaw like the DVD encryption was (very unlikely since the DVD stuff was cracked easily, but maybe not impossible). The interference of the NSA with deployment of encryption products and the publication of of research papers in the past is a bit of a worry. The only thing that mitigates it is that after the Snowden revelations of how they work it appears that they couldn't find their own asses with a map and a sniffer dog. If there was some flaw and payoffs of everyone that found it it would have to be incredibly obscure or the NSA would not be able to cover it up. I've talked myself out of it, we'd probably have heard by now if there was a deliberate flaw or if they had cracked it. Egos in the NSA would not have remained silent - if you have more ambition than loyalty what's the point of keeping a secret when revealing it to someone up the tree, in politics or the private sector can get you a promotion or a well paid sinecure?
They went public when Apple asked them not to. So yes they did do it for publicity and "trial by media" to be more precise. If it was all about the court case they would have done it in court instead of by press release.
There's no evidence to suggest their pod design has heat problems
Do I have to keep on repeating myself - for what they do it makes sense but for general usage take a look at their first design - utterly insane if those disks are getting a lot of use at one. 45 disks packed in with very little airflow due to not much in the way of fans and disks stacked in direct contact with very little space between physical piles of disks. Almost nothing in the way of fans. Stagnant air in corners and edges. If that makes no sense to you why are you commenting? The example I mentioned was a far more conservative design but lost a lot of drives from overheating because it was used more intensely than the Backblaze guys say they use theirs.
Well, I was a bit surprised because some of their drives are getting up into the mid-30s
It is an average so some of their drives are staying at that temperature for very long periods of time. What they get up to as a maximum we can only guess at due to the design and expected usage. If they supplied that information it would be very interesting and far more useful than an average including idle time and including disks that did not fail.
You're off on a dead end arguing Backblaze have heat problems in their design based on a single half-arsed anecdote
No it's based on looking at photographs of a Backblaze pod. There are plenty of good reasons why almost nobody else packs in drives like that, and when they do (like Sun) they put in intermediate rows of fans. While modelling heat transfer was the way I got into cluster computing from engineering some time back that background is not needed to make this call - seriously it's high school stuff. Convection is better if you can move the air a bit more and conduction has to have somewhere to go. Get all those drives running and it's going to be an oven in the middle - so it's just as well Backblaze distribute what load they have.
Which brings me back to the point that matters - test results from an atypical environment shouldn't be taken as more than a guideline in a typical environment.
My second point that matters less is that the design as presented on the net is likely to lead to overheating and even if it doesn't overheat some drives are going to be hotter than others due to being surrounded by slow moving preheated air - so the environment for the drives is going to vary depending on where they are in the "pod" making average failure results a bit less applicable across the board. That design may work for Backblaze but in a situation where the drives are all likely to run at once it's an insane design with almost zero thought put into keeping the drives cool. If instead of running it the way they do you put ZFS on it and scrubbed the drives the heat would probably kill a few of them.
Even relatively modest local storage suffers from the leakage and metal storage embrittlement problems.
No. There is a wikipedia article that I linked elsewhere that should help. If that's not enough consider how much plain carbon steel tubing is used downstream of the hydrogen reformer at a fertilizer works using this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process Hydrogen embrittlement was not an issue for the materials used in such a plant in 1913 or since.
Your other comments about transport, storage, waste etc are valid but embrittlement is not an issue.
That link is the average of all the drives, including the ones that did not fail, over a long time period and has been discussed elsewhere in this thread. An average sadly doesn't tell us as much as you appear to think it does, especially about failed drives since the data is diluted by the ones that did not fail and since the drives are idle for so much of the time. Maximum temperatures of the ones that failed would support your argument but that is not what you are using.
You gave a blanket opinion of it not happening so a single data point is enough to tell you that your opinion does not always reflect reality. Your failed oneupmanship with the resume stuff is also an anecdote BTW and is a bit of an odd thing to do in a place like this.
I'm sure a company with a massive business interest in designing high-capacity storage servers
You don't seem to have been following the thread. My point has always been that it is for a specific use-case that does not make much sense at all outside Backblaze - thus results from them shouldn't be taken as more than an indication when the drives are used outside of the tiny pods with 45 drives packed in tightly and very little airflow.
What evidence is there that peak temperatures and more significant than sustained temperatures ?
Tribology:) The short story is that temperature excursions take a lot of the life out of bearings, motors, lubricants etc, semiconductors have their resistance go up and generate even more heat, materials expand at different rates, polished surfaces stick to each other more etc etc. Something that gets hot every now and then is likely to fail in a different way to something that operates at a constant temperature.
Apple should not be able to push such an update to an existing phone without having the user unlock the phone first.
I don't have an Apple phone but with others being able to reinstall or patch the system via USB is a useful feature. Some have an option where they only boot as far as a program to do updates.
That turns it into a comedy - the FBI going public and then accusing Apple of doing it for publicity. Did they employ some clowns thrown out of the NSA after Snowden or something? It sounds like something the Star Trek Set guy would do.
Yes, the drives at the back will get hotter than those at the front, but it is difficult to see them getting anywhere close to 50
I've seen it happen. Remember we are describing shoving drives in anywhere they will fit instead of a server case designed by someone that went somewhere near a technical college or university for anything other than coding.
Yes, the drives at the back will get hotter than those at the front
What about the nest row, or the one after - 45 drives jammed in tight and almost no airflow. It may work for them but it's not a typical environment so their results shouldn't be taken as anything other than a rough guide for a typical environment.
Also with respect, it's the peak temperatures and not the averages that really matter if heat is killing those drives.
Since the temperature is going to vary wildly over the 45 drives in each "pod" something that would be far more indicative would be the average temperature of the drives that actually failed instead of all of the drives.
Imagine if you had the air output from those five drives feeding into another five, then another five, then five more. Now turn down the speed of the single row of cooling fans. The backblaze usage of write once, read not so much can survive in that situation and just shed a drive every now and again but even your home server is likely to get in trouble with such a design.
It appears you don't understand the situation since they don't have typical servers but have drives packed in very tightly in multiple rows. Ambient temperature is what happens outside the case. If airflow is very poor then there are pockets at a much higher temperature inside the case. It can be 50C+ in there since the 20C air can only trickle through the gaps and is heated by each successive row of drives in instead of only having a single row of drives at the front of the case. They can get away with it because they have the writing load spread over multiple servers at once and very little reading load (archiving with retrieval of portions instead of entire archives at once). However they are still going to have some peak times and some cases are going to get very hot. It's cheaper for them to burn through drives instead of taking up more rack space so I'm not suggesting they are stupid, even if in a different context it appears to be very much so. I've seen a case where someone attempted to copy blackblaze for a normal, if somewhat low usage, server and it lost seven of twelve drives one week - arranged around the midpoint where the heat could not so easily escape. Three more drives were damaged enough that they failed soon after in a different case with decent airflow.
The metal liner means the liner is subject to embrittlement.
Then don't use a steel prone to that or use a different material FFS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement I thought I dumbed it down enough with my sugar umbrella comment. If embrittlement is a problem with the design then the designer did not complete the first year of an engineering degree or the equivalent introductory materials science - or for that matter complete a welding apprenticeship.
I'd better be a bit more blunt and clear. For a variety of reasons BackBlaze pack more drives into each case than others consider sane and they have a lot of heat with very minimal airflow. It may make sense with their business model but it's not a typical server environment. So the results are selecting almost purely for drives that handle high temperatures better than others. While that may simulate rapid ageing for some sorts of defects they are mostly going to fail due to the conditions that most drives are not going to be exposed to.
So IMHO use it as a rough guide but take it with a bucket of salt.
Perhaps the above poster should have written "carbon fibre reinforced plastic" to avoid people making the mistake of thinking that what was suggested was like wrapping the hydrogen up in string. Besides, it's not gas bottles here but solid state storage where the hydrogen needs a bit of encouragement to leave.
And in mine it's at every place where fuel is sold due to it being in use for years as the fuel of choice for taxis. Anecdotes are no substitute for a general case. The refineries here have been selling it for decades while the ones in other places have even just been setting fire to it as a waste product. It's a chicken/egg situation where once there is a market it is commonplace and if there is not it is rare, such as in your city.
Other wild guesses are just as good as that very wild one. Both options have some promise and some viability - anything more than that is currently fortune telling. The most likely situation is a mix of technologies.
Slashdot Mirror
Going to be screwed over for sticking to policy just like a San Francisco IT guy who caught the bosses new squeeze fooling with the IT security manager's PC after hours, then put in the career ending position of being told to reveal a password in front of people that he was forbidden to reveal a password to. Heads or tails - both lose.
Cool, can we charge Senator Peter King with that? He sent money to the IRA to buy semtex explosives from Libya FFS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._King#Support_for_the_IRA
How about Oliver North, now one of the people running the NRA, who sent weapons to Hezbolla, including anti-tank weapons that were supposed to be too secret to sold to US allies?
It's really funny to hear both of them go on about terrorism as if they had not been enabling it.
Oh that's right, no charges for them, it's just a threat to be used on the little guys.
Wow - way off to the land of Oz!
No army here, just a couple of murderers in California - please try to make it back to the topic Toto.
If advantage can be gained by those applying the label then they are a terrorist.
That's how hostage situations get called "terrorism" now among other things.
Expect a lot more of that sort of redefinition even though there is already too much.
Or if it was delivered broken with a built in flaw like the DVD encryption was (very unlikely since the DVD stuff was cracked easily, but maybe not impossible). The interference of the NSA with deployment of encryption products and the publication of of research papers in the past is a bit of a worry. The only thing that mitigates it is that after the Snowden revelations of how they work it appears that they couldn't find their own asses with a map and a sniffer dog. If there was some flaw and payoffs of everyone that found it it would have to be incredibly obscure or the NSA would not be able to cover it up.
I've talked myself out of it, we'd probably have heard by now if there was a deliberate flaw or if they had cracked it. Egos in the NSA would not have remained silent - if you have more ambition than loyalty what's the point of keeping a secret when revealing it to someone up the tree, in politics or the private sector can get you a promotion or a well paid sinecure?
They went public when Apple asked them not to. So yes they did do it for publicity and "trial by media" to be more precise. If it was all about the court case they would have done it in court instead of by press release.
Do I have to keep on repeating myself - for what they do it makes sense but for general usage take a look at their first design - utterly insane if those disks are getting a lot of use at one. 45 disks packed in with very little airflow due to not much in the way of fans and disks stacked in direct contact with very little space between physical piles of disks. Almost nothing in the way of fans. Stagnant air in corners and edges. If that makes no sense to you why are you commenting? The example I mentioned was a far more conservative design but lost a lot of drives from overheating because it was used more intensely than the Backblaze guys say they use theirs.
It is an average so some of their drives are staying at that temperature for very long periods of time. What they get up to as a maximum we can only guess at due to the design and expected usage. If they supplied that information it would be very interesting and far more useful than an average including idle time and including disks that did not fail.
No it's based on looking at photographs of a Backblaze pod. There are plenty of good reasons why almost nobody else packs in drives like that, and when they do (like Sun) they put in intermediate rows of fans. While modelling heat transfer was the way I got into cluster computing from engineering some time back that background is not needed to make this call - seriously it's high school stuff. Convection is better if you can move the air a bit more and conduction has to have somewhere to go. Get all those drives running and it's going to be an oven in the middle - so it's just as well Backblaze distribute what load they have.
Which brings me back to the point that matters - test results from an atypical environment shouldn't be taken as more than a guideline in a typical environment.
My second point that matters less is that the design as presented on the net is likely to lead to overheating and even if it doesn't overheat some drives are going to be hotter than others due to being surrounded by slow moving preheated air - so the environment for the drives is going to vary depending on where they are in the "pod" making average failure results a bit less applicable across the board. That design may work for Backblaze but in a situation where the drives are all likely to run at once it's an insane design with almost zero thought put into keeping the drives cool. If instead of running it the way they do you put ZFS on it and scrubbed the drives the heat would probably kill a few of them.
No.
There is a wikipedia article that I linked elsewhere that should help.
If that's not enough consider how much plain carbon steel tubing is used downstream of the hydrogen reformer at a fertilizer works using this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
Hydrogen embrittlement was not an issue for the materials used in such a plant in 1913 or since.
Your other comments about transport, storage, waste etc are valid but embrittlement is not an issue.
That link is the average of all the drives, including the ones that did not fail, over a long time period and has been discussed elsewhere in this thread.
An average sadly doesn't tell us as much as you appear to think it does, especially about failed drives since the data is diluted by the ones that did not fail and since the drives are idle for so much of the time. Maximum temperatures of the ones that failed would support your argument but that is not what you are using.
You gave a blanket opinion of it not happening so a single data point is enough to tell you that your opinion does not always reflect reality. Your failed oneupmanship with the resume stuff is also an anecdote BTW and is a bit of an odd thing to do in a place like this.
You don't seem to have been following the thread. My point has always been that it is for a specific use-case that does not make much sense at all outside Backblaze - thus results from them shouldn't be taken as more than an indication when the drives are used outside of the tiny pods with 45 drives packed in tightly and very little airflow.
Tribology :)
The short story is that temperature excursions take a lot of the life out of bearings, motors, lubricants etc, semiconductors have their resistance go up and generate even more heat, materials expand at different rates, polished surfaces stick to each other more etc etc. Something that gets hot every now and then is likely to fail in a different way to something that operates at a constant temperature.
I don't have an Apple phone but with others being able to reinstall or patch the system via USB is a useful feature. Some have an option where they only boot as far as a program to do updates.
That turns it into a comedy - the FBI going public and then accusing Apple of doing it for publicity.
Did they employ some clowns thrown out of the NSA after Snowden or something? It sounds like something the Star Trek Set guy would do.
I've seen it happen.
Remember we are describing shoving drives in anywhere they will fit instead of a server case designed by someone that went somewhere near a technical college or university for anything other than coding.
What about the nest row, or the one after - 45 drives jammed in tight and almost no airflow.
It may work for them but it's not a typical environment so their results shouldn't be taken as anything other than a rough guide for a typical environment.
Also with respect, it's the peak temperatures and not the averages that really matter if heat is killing those drives.
Actually no. Check out your local fertilizer works to see the steel tubing they use to carry hydrogen before it is used to make ammonia.
Since the temperature is going to vary wildly over the 45 drives in each "pod" something that would be far more indicative would be the average temperature of the drives that actually failed instead of all of the drives.
Imagine if you had the air output from those five drives feeding into another five, then another five, then five more. Now turn down the speed of the single row of cooling fans. The backblaze usage of write once, read not so much can survive in that situation and just shed a drive every now and again but even your home server is likely to get in trouble with such a design.
It appears you don't understand the situation since they don't have typical servers but have drives packed in very tightly in multiple rows. Ambient temperature is what happens outside the case. If airflow is very poor then there are pockets at a much higher temperature inside the case. It can be 50C+ in there since the 20C air can only trickle through the gaps and is heated by each successive row of drives in instead of only having a single row of drives at the front of the case.
They can get away with it because they have the writing load spread over multiple servers at once and very little reading load (archiving with retrieval of portions instead of entire archives at once). However they are still going to have some peak times and some cases are going to get very hot. It's cheaper for them to burn through drives instead of taking up more rack space so I'm not suggesting they are stupid, even if in a different context it appears to be very much so.
I've seen a case where someone attempted to copy blackblaze for a normal, if somewhat low usage, server and it lost seven of twelve drives one week - arranged around the midpoint where the heat could not so easily escape. Three more drives were damaged enough that they failed soon after in a different case with decent airflow.
That too but the comment was about "data files". Published standards were the go until Gates and others used secrecy to lock customers in.
Extrapolating over ten years. Generally a very bad move in a changing situation and just asking for ridicule in ten years time.
Then don't use a steel prone to that or use a different material FFS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
I thought I dumbed it down enough with my sugar umbrella comment. If embrittlement is a problem with the design then the designer did not complete the first year of an engineering degree or the equivalent introductory materials science - or for that matter complete a welding apprenticeship.
I'd better be a bit more blunt and clear.
For a variety of reasons BackBlaze pack more drives into each case than others consider sane and they have a lot of heat with very minimal airflow. It may make sense with their business model but it's not a typical server environment.
So the results are selecting almost purely for drives that handle high temperatures better than others. While that may simulate rapid ageing for some sorts of defects they are mostly going to fail due to the conditions that most drives are not going to be exposed to.
So IMHO use it as a rough guide but take it with a bucket of salt.
Perhaps the above poster should have written "carbon fibre reinforced plastic" to avoid people making the mistake of thinking that what was suggested was like wrapping the hydrogen up in string.
Besides, it's not gas bottles here but solid state storage where the hydrogen needs a bit of encouragement to leave.
Anything other than plain carbon steel or low alloy steel is crazy expensive?
And in mine it's at every place where fuel is sold due to it being in use for years as the fuel of choice for taxis. Anecdotes are no substitute for a general case. The refineries here have been selling it for decades while the ones in other places have even just been setting fire to it as a waste product.
It's a chicken/egg situation where once there is a market it is commonplace and if there is not it is rare, such as in your city.
Other wild guesses are just as good as that very wild one. Both options have some promise and some viability - anything more than that is currently fortune telling.
The most likely situation is a mix of technologies.