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According to https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-backblaze-buys-hard-drives/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-backblaze-buys-hard-drive..., consumer drives giv
by throwaway894345 5y ago
According to https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-backblaze-buys-hard-drives/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-backblaze-buys-hard-drive..., consumer drives give better quality, and the main reason BB buys enterprise drives is that consumer drives aren't available at their scale.
- dijit 5y agoJust to add: Consumer drives are not necessarily sub-par quality-wise just because they're consumer drives. Sometimes what it comes down to is firmware; WD NAS drives used to be almost identical to conumer drives except their firmware would report errors back to the SATA controller directly instead of continually trying to read the block. Continually reading the block seems doomed but it works a surprisingly large number of times, and when it's successful the block is often put somewhere else on the drive transparently (and the old block is marked as "bad"). This drastically improves the lifetime of the drives since they're slowly wearing down vs "going bad" because of a single block being unrecoverable. This is not the only difference, but it's one thing to consider. It's similar to how the linux kernel can be compiled with low latency in mind; which causes lower throughput but makes the desktop experience much nicer (ime). It's just trade-offs. Nothing is just "objectively better" it's a different trade off.
- throwaway894345 5y ago> Consumer drives are not necessarily sub-par quality-wise just because they're consumer drives. According to the link I shared, they aren't lower quality, they're higher quality than enterprise drives. But that's an interesting note about the drive firmware!