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I don't think anyone imagines that the hard drive manufacturers are making special drives for Backblaze. The question is 'Are they getting the cream of the crop
by didgetmaster 4y ago
I don't think anyone imagines that the hard drive manufacturers are making special drives for Backblaze. The question is 'Are they getting the cream of the crop?' out of all the drives that are manufactured.
Every drive must go through a series of tests before it is judged suitable for sale to the consumer. Drives that fall below a certain threshold are judged 'failed' but there can be a variety of drives that fall within the 'passed' range. Some are just barely above the threshold, others are way above.
It is kind of like binning for CPUs. The very best ones can have their base clocks increased and sold at a premium. The same kind of differentiation could be done for hard drives.
- bradknowles 4y agoDuring the time that I interned at Imprimis in 1989 (just before they got bought by Seagate, and before I started my first "real" job at the Defense Information Systems Agency in the basement of the Pentagon, I know that I heard the manager of Manufacturing Engineering tell the engineers on multiple occasions that a certain manufacturer was coming through for a clean room visit in a certain number of days, and so the engineers had to clear the space of all drives that had certain types of failures. They also definitely did a binning process where all drives being sold to certain manufacturers would be heavily tested for certain types of failure modes and only those that passed the most rigorous tests in a certain area would be approved to be sold to certain manufacturers. Of course, each manufacturer had their own things that they were concerned about. I don't know if they still do binning today, but they certainly did it back in 1989.
- bradknowles 4y agoOh, and even back then, Apple always got the cream of the crop.