10 ms·

I'm curious why the author believes that beating the ever loving crap out of drives in harsh conditions and seeing which ones come out, overall, on top creates

I'm curious why the author believes that beating the ever loving crap out of drives in harsh conditions and seeing which ones come out, overall, on top creates a myth. Perhaps the Backblaze article is better headlined "which hard drives seem to hold up well under pressure." Consumer environments usually have crappy, unreliable power (power strip chained to power strip plugged into an outlet from the 1960s), random vibrations (especially with kids), and poor air flow conditions (who here has done Family IT and had to carve the dust out of the case stuck behind a non-moving fan?). The only thing a consumer environment lacks from Backblaze's comparison is 24/7 read/write operations.

mnordhoff 13y ago
I would read an article about how bullet-resistant different models of car are, but I wouldn't completely change my purchasing decisions, as I avoid bullets. (Whoa, I didn't even mean to use a car analogy.) "Consumer environments usually have crappy, unreliable power ..." I would hope that Backblaze is on reliable, stable, data center power -- though knowing how cost-conscious they are, perhaps not -- so that's one aspect where they wouldn't be able to provide good information.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  You got it backwards. You live in Kabul, so the article on bullet resistance is completely relevant. The point is that Backblaze's deployment conditions are way more similar to a domestic user's than other enterprise deployments.
  - mnordhoff 13y ago
    More similar, yes, but maybe not similar enough. I wonder if it's the pathological vibration killing the Seagates. If so, you don't want to use Seagates in a file server sitting on top of your washing machine, but maybe they're fine for your living room media box. Edit: Unlike Backblaze, I have no hard numbers, and can only pull suppositions out of my ass.
wmf 13y ago
It's not even clear to me that Backblaze is accessing the drives that much. I would imagine most of their data is written once and never read or deleted.

mnordhoff 13y ago

I would read an article about how bullet-resistant different models of car are, but I wouldn't completely change my purchasing decisions, as I avoid bullets. (Whoa, I didn't even mean to use a car analogy.) "Consumer environments usually have crappy, unreliable power ..." I would hope that Backblaze is on reliable, stable, data center power -- though knowing how cost-conscious they are, perhaps not -- so that's one aspect where they wouldn't be able to provide good information.

ricardobeat 13y ago
You got it backwards. You live in Kabul, so the article on bullet resistance is completely relevant. The point is that Backblaze's deployment conditions are way more similar to a domestic user's than other enterprise deployments.
- mnordhoff 13y ago
  More similar, yes, but maybe not similar enough. I wonder if it's the pathological vibration killing the Seagates. If so, you don't want to use Seagates in a file server sitting on top of your washing machine, but maybe they're fine for your living room media box. Edit: Unlike Backblaze, I have no hard numbers, and can only pull suppositions out of my ass.

wmf 13y ago

It's not even clear to me that Backblaze is accessing the drives that much. I would imagine most of their data is written once and never read or deleted.