3 ms·

WD cleaned up their act after the deathstar era and Seagate repeatedly shat the bed on HDD reliability (which continues to this day, backblaze had a bunch of se

by paulmd 3y ago

WD cleaned up their act after the deathstar era and Seagate repeatedly shat the bed on HDD reliability (which continues to this day, backblaze had a bunch of seagate failures again). There’s literally only 3-4 players left, HGST was bought by WD, and then there’s Toshiba, so the choices aren’t very deep. I’ve had good results with Toshiba but they’re often more expensive, and volume is a lot lower than the other players. Samsung SSDs are another darling of the gaming community that has produced a parade of defective products over the last decade. Literally since the 830 series I think there has only been one or two models without a massive firmware defect or faulty flash.

linsomniac 3y ago
Deathstar was well before WD owned them I believe. I think that was post IBM, Hitachi or HGST. Isn't it funny that Backblaze finds Seagate fairly high in failures, but keeps going with them. But they are optimizing something different than I was. I was managing fairly small clusters, in the 10-150 node range. I considered it fairly expensive to have a drive failure, even if we used "remote hands" to replace the drive, we'd spend easy a couple hours on a drive failure between replacing, rebuilding, verifying, procurement and testing replacement drives. We ended up using mostly pairs of Deskstars between 2000 and 2010 when I was dealing with most of my mechanical drives. We have been using Samsung Pro and Evo 860 drives at my current job, probably have 40-50 of them, and have had good luck with them. But, I'm starting to wonder if we should rely on them based on the discussions here. We only really use them in dev and staging, production is largely Intel. I only recall one Samsung failure I've had, I had one as a ZFS log/cache drive for ~3 years and it started reporting errors.
- paulmd 3y ago
  Yes, Backblaze optimizes for planned failure rates and the consequences for their operations, and they will take cheap and fails if it's cheap enough and you can give them 10 million. that's why they didn't overly care about the seagate failures from the thailand thing etc. we need hard drives, we need to not pay $1k a drive (whatever), let's go have people buy the externals we can get. And seagate has always shipped by the truckload, and now they're cheap because people avoid them lol (legitimately). I also agree with your point that you're optimizing for something different than backblaze. Same for a lot of homelab users. High failure rates on seagate? Umm, if they're sensitive that actually might make them worse in consumer service if they actually do fail all the time. Your whole disk (possibly array, hope you had backups) can go down and some of these failure rates have been absurd, it's like 130% annualized failure rate (everything is dying within 8 months) on the worst of it. And it's just consistently always seagate that is fucking up and while I'm sure This Time Is Different I have so far managed to evade all hard drive failure completely since I kicked seagate to the curb. including my seagate 3tb from the worst model (probably bet it's dead now tho lol) and an ancient seagate laptop hdd from my first laptop (conroe). WD has mostly been fine except for the stealth SMR thing. I've never had a problem with any of my WD Reds, I knew what was on the market at the time (8TB red and hgst white label heliums) and I bought a bunch (8x8tb for $135/dr, it was cheap) and shucked them, and I got those exact models and it was fine. I should spin up my old USB 3.0 raid array and see if it spins, 4xWD Red 2TB as well, never been a problem (and that was 5400rpm). Toshiba has also been fantastic in terms of quality, and the X300 and N300 are basically the same in all respects other than name (the bit error stuff is bullshit). Toshiba has much smaller volume than either of the other two, but, I love their products when they're available and price-competitive, they've done great for me. Personally for HDDs I just bought some HGST helium 14tb SAS3s from serverpartdeals for $135 a pop. the fanout of a SAS controller is nice in my environment anyway. that's gonna be my cold storage to migrate off 8x8 - I don't see a reason to run 6+2, I do see a reason to run 3+1 and just increase capacity and have alternate backups of important stuff. You can also just buy 7.92TB enterprise U.2 2.5" TLC NVME drives for around $350, but then you need a trimode adapter (if SAS) to run them. But that's preferable to me rather than running consumer M.2 NVMe at $170-200 for 4TB. You can also run them off pcie adapter cards or M.2 slots (with riser cable) of course, but, they do run hot and I like the fanout factor, not like I'm ever going to hit anything super hard.
  - linsomniac 3y ago
    I saw someone else mentioning 7.92TB enterprise for ~$800, that's pretty compelling and crazy at $350. But, I'm just putting together a home server right now and it's all built out with 2.5" SATA drives (9x Samsung 860 EVOs I got cheap when my previous company went out of business, going to put 7x Toshiba spinning drives in once I get the data on them backed up). Got a Dell R730 with 256GB RAM and 24 cores for $350 landed off ebay and couldn't resist. Set up a VM last night for my son to do a backup of his laptop before he upgraded the OS, wanted to foster his desire to do a backup for sure. :-) "Ok, send me your SSH public key by magic-wormhole and install restic..."

by paulmd 3y ago

linsomniac 3y ago

Deathstar was well before WD owned them I believe. I think that was post IBM, Hitachi or HGST. Isn't it funny that Backblaze finds Seagate fairly high in failures, but keeps going with them. But they are optimizing something different than I was. I was managing fairly small clusters, in the 10-150 node range. I considered it fairly expensive to have a drive failure, even if we used "remote hands" to replace the drive, we'd spend easy a couple hours on a drive failure between replacing, rebuilding, verifying, procurement and testing replacement drives. We ended up using mostly pairs of Deskstars between 2000 and 2010 when I was dealing with most of my mechanical drives. We have been using Samsung Pro and Evo 860 drives at my current job, probably have 40-50 of them, and have had good luck with them. But, I'm starting to wonder if we should rely on them based on the discussions here. We only really use them in dev and staging, production is largely Intel. I only recall one Samsung failure I've had, I had one as a ZFS log/cache drive for ~3 years and it started reporting errors.

paulmd 3y ago
Yes, Backblaze optimizes for planned failure rates and the consequences for their operations, and they will take cheap and fails if it's cheap enough and you can give them 10 million. that's why they didn't overly care about the seagate failures from the thailand thing etc. we need hard drives, we need to not pay $1k a drive (whatever), let's go have people buy the externals we can get. And seagate has always shipped by the truckload, and now they're cheap because people avoid them lol (legitimately). I also agree with your point that you're optimizing for something different than backblaze. Same for a lot of homelab users. High failure rates on seagate? Umm, if they're sensitive that actually might make them worse in consumer service if they actually do fail all the time. Your whole disk (possibly array, hope you had backups) can go down and some of these failure rates have been absurd, it's like 130% annualized failure rate (everything is dying within 8 months) on the worst of it. And it's just consistently always seagate that is fucking up and while I'm sure This Time Is Different I have so far managed to evade all hard drive failure completely since I kicked seagate to the curb. including my seagate 3tb from the worst model (probably bet it's dead now tho lol) and an ancient seagate laptop hdd from my first laptop (conroe). WD has mostly been fine except for the stealth SMR thing. I've never had a problem with any of my WD Reds, I knew what was on the market at the time (8TB red and hgst white label heliums) and I bought a bunch (8x8tb for $135/dr, it was cheap) and shucked them, and I got those exact models and it was fine. I should spin up my old USB 3.0 raid array and see if it spins, 4xWD Red 2TB as well, never been a problem (and that was 5400rpm). Toshiba has also been fantastic in terms of quality, and the X300 and N300 are basically the same in all respects other than name (the bit error stuff is bullshit). Toshiba has much smaller volume than either of the other two, but, I love their products when they're available and price-competitive, they've done great for me. Personally for HDDs I just bought some HGST helium 14tb SAS3s from serverpartdeals for $135 a pop. the fanout of a SAS controller is nice in my environment anyway. that's gonna be my cold storage to migrate off 8x8 - I don't see a reason to run 6+2, I do see a reason to run 3+1 and just increase capacity and have alternate backups of important stuff. You can also just buy 7.92TB enterprise U.2 2.5" TLC NVME drives for around $350, but then you need a trimode adapter (if SAS) to run them. But that's preferable to me rather than running consumer M.2 NVMe at $170-200 for 4TB. You can also run them off pcie adapter cards or M.2 slots (with riser cable) of course, but, they do run hot and I like the fanout factor, not like I'm ever going to hit anything super hard.
- linsomniac 3y ago
  I saw someone else mentioning 7.92TB enterprise for ~$800, that's pretty compelling and crazy at $350. But, I'm just putting together a home server right now and it's all built out with 2.5" SATA drives (9x Samsung 860 EVOs I got cheap when my previous company went out of business, going to put 7x Toshiba spinning drives in once I get the data on them backed up). Got a Dell R730 with 256GB RAM and 24 cores for $350 landed off ebay and couldn't resist. Set up a VM last night for my son to do a backup of his laptop before he upgraded the OS, wanted to foster his desire to do a backup for sure. :-) "Ok, send me your SSH public key by magic-wormhole and install restic..."