5 ms·

I wonder why Western Digital is almost absent, does anyone know why?

by louwrentius 6y ago

Hamuko 6y ago
Aren't all of the HGSTs essentially WDs?
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Yes, but does that explain why there are almost no WD branded drives?
- numpad0 6y ago
  IIRC, WD > 6TB are all 7K2 and HGST. HGST itself is "a WD company" but for antitrust reasons the corporates are separate.
  - syshum 6y ago
    HGST has a brand was phased out years go, and the company was not separate for Anti-Trust reason WD had to sell and license some HGST assets for Anti-Trust reasons, but there was never a requirement for them to be a seperate company HGST Websites and other things today just redirect to WD, there is no new HGST branded things being made as far as I am aware
    - numpad0 6y ago
      I still see some drivers sold online under HGST branding. Probably market dependent?
      - syshum 6y ago
        Used or Referbs. Maybe some old stock but at this point I doubt it... You will see "UltraStar" branding but it will be "Western Digital UltraStar" not HGST UltraStar. Some retailers may even still put HGST in the listing (i.e Amazon still has several listing for new Drives that refer to HGST) but the Packaging, offical documents, and everything that comes out of WD will not have any HGST branding on it, it will not say HGST on the drive etc
brianwski 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > I wonder why Western Digital is almost absent, does anyone know why? Most of the time the answer comes down to price/GByte. But it isn't QUITE as simple as that. Backblaze tries to optimize for total cost most of the time. That isn't just the cost of the drive, a drive that is twice as large in storage still takes the same identical amount of rack space and often the same electricity as the drive that is half the storage. This means that we have a spreadsheet and calculate what the total cost over a 5 year expected lifespan will turn out to be. So for example, even if the drive that is twice as large costs MORE than twice as much it can still make sense to purchase it. As to failure rates, Backblaze essentially doesn't care what the failure rate of a drive is, other than to factor that into the spreadsheet. If we think one particular drive fails 2% more of the time, we still buy it if it is 2% cheaper, make sense? So that's the answer most of the time, although Backblaze is always making sure we have alternatives, so we're willing to purchase a small number of pretty much anybody's drives of pretty much any size in order to "qualify" them. It means we run one pod of 60 of them for a month or two, then we run a full vault of 1,200 of that drive type for a month or two, just in case a good deal floats by where we can buy a few thousand of that type of drive. We have some confidence they will work.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  >As to failure rates, Backblaze essentially doesn't care what the failure rate of a drive is, other than to factor that into the spreadsheet. Guessing shit like the ST3000DM001 is a whole different thing entirely.
  - brianwski 6y ago
    > Guessing shit like the ST3000DM001 is a whole different thing entirely. :-) Yeah, there are times where the failure rate can rise so high it threatens the data durability. The WORST is when failures are time correlated. Let's say the same one capacitor dies on a particular model of drive after precisely 6 months of being powered up. So everything is all calm and happy and smooth in operations, and then our world starts going sideways 1,200 drives at a time (one "vault" - our minimum unit of deployment). Internally we've talked some about staggering drive models and drive ages to make these moments less impactful. But at any one moment one drive model usually stands out at a good price point, and buying in bulk we get a little discount, so this hasn't come to be.
atYevP 6y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> We just started deploying more of them! We added almost 6k WDC drives in Q4 - so we're getting more of them in the fleet! They have a pretty low AFR - but haven't been deployed for too long, so they'll be interesting to follow!
- hinkley 6y ago
  Is your drive usage really homogenous or do you have situations where slightly more reliable drives are prioritized? Like say for servers or logging.
  - atYevP 6y ago
    We do have some drives that we use as boot drives and for logging. We write about them a bit in the post - they're primarily SSDs, so not included in the overall mix of data drives!
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing!

I wonder why Western Digital is almost absent, does anyone know why?

Hamuko 6y ago

Aren't all of the HGSTs essentially WDs?

louwrentius 6y ago
Yes, but does that explain why there are almost no WD branded drives?
numpad0 6y ago
IIRC, WD > 6TB are all 7K2 and HGST. HGST itself is "a WD company" but for antitrust reasons the corporates are separate.
- syshum 6y ago
  HGST has a brand was phased out years go, and the company was not separate for Anti-Trust reason WD had to sell and license some HGST assets for Anti-Trust reasons, but there was never a requirement for them to be a seperate company HGST Websites and other things today just redirect to WD, there is no new HGST branded things being made as far as I am aware
  - numpad0 6y ago
    I still see some drivers sold online under HGST branding. Probably market dependent?
    - syshum 6y ago
      Used or Referbs. Maybe some old stock but at this point I doubt it... You will see "UltraStar" branding but it will be "Western Digital UltraStar" not HGST UltraStar. Some retailers may even still put HGST in the listing (i.e Amazon still has several listing for new Drives that refer to HGST) but the Packaging, offical documents, and everything that comes out of WD will not have any HGST branding on it, it will not say HGST on the drive etc

brianwski 6y ago

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > I wonder why Western Digital is almost absent, does anyone know why? Most of the time the answer comes down to price/GByte. But it isn't QUITE as simple as that. Backblaze tries to optimize for total cost most of the time. That isn't just the cost of the drive, a drive that is twice as large in storage still takes the same identical amount of rack space and often the same electricity as the drive that is half the storage. This means that we have a spreadsheet and calculate what the total cost over a 5 year expected lifespan will turn out to be. So for example, even if the drive that is twice as large costs MORE than twice as much it can still make sense to purchase it. As to failure rates, Backblaze essentially doesn't care what the failure rate of a drive is, other than to factor that into the spreadsheet. If we think one particular drive fails 2% more of the time, we still buy it if it is 2% cheaper, make sense? So that's the answer most of the time, although Backblaze is always making sure we have alternatives, so we're willing to purchase a small number of pretty much anybody's drives of pretty much any size in order to "qualify" them. It means we run one pod of 60 of them for a month or two, then we run a full vault of 1,200 of that drive type for a month or two, just in case a good deal floats by where we can buy a few thousand of that type of drive. We have some confidence they will work.

Hamuko 6y ago
>As to failure rates, Backblaze essentially doesn't care what the failure rate of a drive is, other than to factor that into the spreadsheet. Guessing shit like the ST3000DM001 is a whole different thing entirely.
- brianwski 6y ago
  > Guessing shit like the ST3000DM001 is a whole different thing entirely. :-) Yeah, there are times where the failure rate can rise so high it threatens the data durability. The WORST is when failures are time correlated. Let's say the same one capacitor dies on a particular model of drive after precisely 6 months of being powered up. So everything is all calm and happy and smooth in operations, and then our world starts going sideways 1,200 drives at a time (one "vault" - our minimum unit of deployment). Internally we've talked some about staggering drive models and drive ages to make these moments less impactful. But at any one moment one drive model usually stands out at a good price point, and buying in bulk we get a little discount, so this hasn't come to be.

atYevP 6y ago

Yev from Backblaze here -> We just started deploying more of them! We added almost 6k WDC drives in Q4 - so we're getting more of them in the fleet! They have a pretty low AFR - but haven't been deployed for too long, so they'll be interesting to follow!

hinkley 6y ago
Is your drive usage really homogenous or do you have situations where slightly more reliable drives are prioritized? Like say for servers or logging.
- atYevP 6y ago
  We do have some drives that we use as boot drives and for logging. We write about them a bit in the post - they're primarily SSDs, so not included in the overall mix of data drives!
louwrentius 6y ago
Thanks for sharing!