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This makes me curious of where the cost/benefit point is between these brands of drives. Do they buy enough that the reduced cost for higher failure rate outwe
by VectorLock 8y ago
This makes me curious of where the cost/benefit point is between these brands of drives. Do they buy enough that the reduced cost for higher failure rate outweighs the expense of buying more expensive drives?
- fludlight 8y agoIt's only partially a question of quantity. The larger factor is the amount of labor involved in dealing with a bad drive. Their (large) operation seems automated so I assume if they have a single drive failure in machine #1234 (which has 50+ drives) they have an automated way of switching off said drive. Then they leave it there until the entire rack is replaced many years later. Other operations have to send a human to manually replace every single failed drive as soon as it fails, which is very expensive as a % of the cost of the bare drive.
- simcop2387 8y agoThey buy enough drives that there's another point of data that's needed for them. Availability of the disks. If they need to expand a few 10s of petabytes they may only be able to get enough disks from one group regardless of reliability concerns.
- VectorLock 8y agoThats what surprised me when I learned that they were "shucking" drives from off the shelf external drives at some point.