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Does anybody know why they still use so many Seagate and WD models when the HGST seem to have the better reliability? Am I reading the stats wrong or are other
by JepZ 9y ago
Does anybody know why they still use so many Seagate and WD models when the HGST seem to have the better reliability?
Am I reading the stats wrong or are other factors involved like higher prices or so?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- boomboomsubban 9y agoThey aren't using many WD drives at all, and in the high use drives HSGT's roughly 1% failure rate against Seagate's roughly 2% failure rate is offset by price.
- hvidgaard 9y agoIf the TCO / TB is lower, then it doesn't matter if they fail more often, it's already factored in.
- dspillett 9y agoAs well as the risk/cost calculation already mentioned, it makes sense to spread over multiple manufacturers to allow for sudden problems with the one that is currently most reliable. If HGST has a huge production problem now that doesn't make its effects known until silly high rates of failure occur a year down the line, backblaze and other large storage providers would have a sudden glut of replacements to manage (possibly pro-active replacements, or even worse the expense of bulking up their redundancy level at least temporarily to mitigate the extra risk). Spreading over multiple manufacturers limits the impact of situations like this.
- w0m 9y agoThis. The differences in failure rate aren't worth the risk.
- AdamJacobMuller 9y agoIt's also very beneficial to spread data across different drive manufacturers. If, for example, a particular HGST model starts to have massive failure problems in a year (massive at this scale would be like 20% failure rates), well, at least you still have a healthy population of Seagate/WD drives where the data on the HGST drives is also replicated to. I wouldn't be remotely shocked if the Backblaze software takes drive model into account in data placement. In addition to that, it makes sense from a purchasing perspective to spread your purchases around to many vendors. Make sure that Hitachi knows that they're not irreplaceable if they don't give you a good enough price you'll just buy more Seagate drives. Make Seagate always be worried that if you shifted enough purchasing to HGST they'll cut you a really good deal and potentially undercut Seagate.
- atYevP 9y agoYev from Backblaze here -> Mostly comes down to pricing! Since our service is designed for drive failure, we don't mind a bit of it here and there, but we are const-conscious, so if the drive failure rate < cost-per-GB, we tend to be OK w/ a bit more failure.
- sixothree 9y agoDo you deal with drive warranties?