6 ms·

Biggest takeaway was at the end, with the "enterprise" drives being slightly less reliable than the consumer ones at half the cost.

masklinn 12y ago
Second takeaway: if you want working HDDs, go with Hitachi.
- moe 12y ago
  You are wrong. The second takeaway is: Check the last Backblaze report right before you buy new drives.
- ars 12y ago
  But Hitachi is owned by Western Digital, and Western Digital hard disks are not doing quite as well.
  - linker3000 12y ago
    It's now called "HGST (a Western Digital company)" and the two product lines (WD and HGST HDDs) are totally separate in both parts and manufacturing. /HGST employee
    - gukov 12y ago
      What makes your drives so good?
      - atYevP 12y ago
        Our guess is that they kiss every one of them before they leave the factory. For good luck...
        linker3000 12y ago
        Please do not publicize our trade secrets.
        atYevP 12y ago
        Shit.
    - Jetlag 12y ago
      Can you explain what "assets" Toshiba got to start their 3.5" drive business? Are HGST and Toshiba making very similar 3.5" drives?
      - linker3000 12y ago
        Can't help with that one at all.
    - Someone1234 12y ago
      You don't work in the HDD division, right? Someone seriously needs to look into ADM (advanced power management) on your 2.5" drives. It is currently set too low and the drives power down instantly after each instruction, resulting in simply astonishingly terrible IO (and seriously lag spikes). It is so bad even running HD video off of some 2014 HGST laptop hard drives causes distortion. There's also no way to increase the ADM value indefinitely that I am aware of (it reverts after every sleep).
      - linker3000 12y ago
        Nope, I do other stuff with Flash Platforms. Go through the support link on the web site and send in your comments.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - atYevP 12y ago
    Yev from Backblaze here -> HGST is run by a completely different division w/ a different manufacturing line. So there are some difference!
    - atYevP 12y ago
      ^ *is some difference. #sigh
VLM 12y ago
And thats whats weird, who is the audience for the article? I know what enterprise drive means and I know the author is smart and knows what it means, so why the weird implications in the article that have nothing to do with "enterprise"? For those not "in the know" the hardware is the same, but desktop firmware drives will sit there for 10 seconds or whatever it is beating the drive when there's a read (or write) fail on the assumption that if your machine only has one drive you're better off trying as hard as possible to keep retrying until it works, and possibly the slowness will motivate them to replace (god forbid an end user have backups lol) Enterprise firmware, when it has a soft fail, just croaks as fast as possible. That lets the raid array hurry up and do its thing, or maybe even higher level replication do its thing. (edited to add the old startup adage of "fail quickly". Thats what enterprise drives do to keep overall array latency low, which is counter productive for consumer non-array drives) Aside from the firmware load the prices are different because usually enterprise has better guarantee and better service and unlike consumer drives which statistically are never replaced under guarantee so you can claim anything on paper for marketing purposes it won't cost anything, enterprise drives WILL get replaced and there will be a papertrail etc. So the guarantee for an enterprise drive actually costs something. Sometimes the firmware has some other subtle differences like how it handles recalibrates and scrubs (consumer home drives are like "too bad you get to wait on my schedule" and again, enterprise will go to some effort to eliminate array latency) My guess is the article is subtle astroturf by the winning drive mfgr?
- gknoy 12y ago
  I'm not sure who the audience is, but thank you for your explanation of the differences between consumer and enterprise drive firmwares. That runs counter to my naive assumptions, which was that "enterprise" targeted things tend to be of higher reliability and quality than the consumer-targeted alternatives. I imagine someone in the drive / enterprise storage business would know better, but many of us might not have known that.
  - VLM 12y ago
    "tend to be of higher reliability and quality" Oh I should preface my remarks with "in family, same technology level" etc. I'm talking about the same package with the same storage where different firmwares are loaded. Thats the business model the OP is in, he makes posts about stripping consumer drives out of external cases and I don't want to speak for him but he radiates the impression of their whole secret sauce being reliability at the system level not the hardware level. It is true in my experience that "exotic hardware" marketed as enterprise grade is different physical hardware and is going to be a different level of reliability than consumer hardware. So the difference between an office NAS SATA 1 TB enterprise and consumer grade is a firmware load, and I think thats what the article is talking about. There is a big difference between a 15K SAS enterprise server drive and a 7200 SATA consumer drive at the hardware level, but that's not the article author's "thing".
sliverstorm 12y ago
I don't believe reliability has ever necessarily been an "enterprise" feature. The concrete features I understand "enterprise" drives as having are: 1) firmware is built with RAID in mind. This might sound weird, but consumer drives are more likely to have problems with RAID, just because they aren't designed for it. See, for example, the first WD Green drives crashing RAID clusters because some timeout was too high. 2) Longer warranty period 3) This may not be true anymore, but I believe they typically feature larger cache 4) ECC [1]: http://www.pantz.org/hardware/disks/what_makes_a_hard_drive_enterprise_class.html http://www.pantz.org/hardware/disks/what_makes_a_hard_drive_...
- acdha 12y ago
  At every sales-pitch I've ever attended, the enterprise vendors mention “reliability” about every other word – the message that your boss will fire you for taking risks unless you buy their hardware is communicated with the subtlety of a solar eclipse. As for the RAID point, you'd very much want to find real data for that. I've heard similar folklore but have also heard plenty of lost data stories from enterprise disks in enterprise RAID. If I were building out a large storage farm, I'd strongly consider forgoing hardware RAID altogether and using something like ZFS so it'd be observable.
  - wmf 12y ago
    Being optimized for RAID basically means TLER and possibly never spinning down.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    heard plenty of lost data stories from enterprise disks in enterprise RAID If you've ever worked with enterprise RAID, that should not surprise you! RAID is powerful, but also so easy to botch...

masklinn 12y ago

Second takeaway: if you want working HDDs, go with Hitachi.

moe 12y ago
You are wrong. The second takeaway is: Check the last Backblaze report right before you buy new drives.
ars 12y ago
But Hitachi is owned by Western Digital, and Western Digital hard disks are not doing quite as well.
- linker3000 12y ago
  It's now called "HGST (a Western Digital company)" and the two product lines (WD and HGST HDDs) are totally separate in both parts and manufacturing. /HGST employee
  - gukov 12y ago
    What makes your drives so good?
    - atYevP 12y ago
      Our guess is that they kiss every one of them before they leave the factory. For good luck...
      - linker3000 12y ago
        Please do not publicize our trade secrets.
        atYevP 12y ago
        Shit.
  - Jetlag 12y ago
    Can you explain what "assets" Toshiba got to start their 3.5" drive business? Are HGST and Toshiba making very similar 3.5" drives?
    - linker3000 12y ago
      Can't help with that one at all.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    You don't work in the HDD division, right? Someone seriously needs to look into ADM (advanced power management) on your 2.5" drives. It is currently set too low and the drives power down instantly after each instruction, resulting in simply astonishingly terrible IO (and seriously lag spikes). It is so bad even running HD video off of some 2014 HGST laptop hard drives causes distortion. There's also no way to increase the ADM value indefinitely that I am aware of (it reverts after every sleep).
    - linker3000 12y ago
      Nope, I do other stuff with Flash Platforms. Go through the support link on the web site and send in your comments.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- atYevP 12y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> HGST is run by a completely different division w/ a different manufacturing line. So there are some difference!
  - atYevP 12y ago
    ^ *is some difference. #sigh

VLM 12y ago

And thats whats weird, who is the audience for the article? I know what enterprise drive means and I know the author is smart and knows what it means, so why the weird implications in the article that have nothing to do with "enterprise"? For those not "in the know" the hardware is the same, but desktop firmware drives will sit there for 10 seconds or whatever it is beating the drive when there's a read (or write) fail on the assumption that if your machine only has one drive you're better off trying as hard as possible to keep retrying until it works, and possibly the slowness will motivate them to replace (god forbid an end user have backups lol) Enterprise firmware, when it has a soft fail, just croaks as fast as possible. That lets the raid array hurry up and do its thing, or maybe even higher level replication do its thing. (edited to add the old startup adage of "fail quickly". Thats what enterprise drives do to keep overall array latency low, which is counter productive for consumer non-array drives) Aside from the firmware load the prices are different because usually enterprise has better guarantee and better service and unlike consumer drives which statistically are never replaced under guarantee so you can claim anything on paper for marketing purposes it won't cost anything, enterprise drives WILL get replaced and there will be a papertrail etc. So the guarantee for an enterprise drive actually costs something. Sometimes the firmware has some other subtle differences like how it handles recalibrates and scrubs (consumer home drives are like "too bad you get to wait on my schedule" and again, enterprise will go to some effort to eliminate array latency) My guess is the article is subtle astroturf by the winning drive mfgr?

gknoy 12y ago
I'm not sure who the audience is, but thank you for your explanation of the differences between consumer and enterprise drive firmwares. That runs counter to my naive assumptions, which was that "enterprise" targeted things tend to be of higher reliability and quality than the consumer-targeted alternatives. I imagine someone in the drive / enterprise storage business would know better, but many of us might not have known that.
- VLM 12y ago
  "tend to be of higher reliability and quality" Oh I should preface my remarks with "in family, same technology level" etc. I'm talking about the same package with the same storage where different firmwares are loaded. Thats the business model the OP is in, he makes posts about stripping consumer drives out of external cases and I don't want to speak for him but he radiates the impression of their whole secret sauce being reliability at the system level not the hardware level. It is true in my experience that "exotic hardware" marketed as enterprise grade is different physical hardware and is going to be a different level of reliability than consumer hardware. So the difference between an office NAS SATA 1 TB enterprise and consumer grade is a firmware load, and I think thats what the article is talking about. There is a big difference between a 15K SAS enterprise server drive and a 7200 SATA consumer drive at the hardware level, but that's not the article author's "thing".

sliverstorm 12y ago

I don't believe reliability has ever necessarily been an "enterprise" feature. The concrete features I understand "enterprise" drives as having are: 1) firmware is built with RAID in mind. This might sound weird, but consumer drives are more likely to have problems with RAID, just because they aren't designed for it. See, for example, the first WD Green drives crashing RAID clusters because some timeout was too high. 2) Longer warranty period 3) This may not be true anymore, but I believe they typically feature larger cache 4) ECC [1]: http://www.pantz.org/hardware/disks/what_makes_a_hard_drive_enterprise_class.html http://www.pantz.org/hardware/disks/what_makes_a_hard_drive_...

acdha 12y ago
At every sales-pitch I've ever attended, the enterprise vendors mention “reliability” about every other word – the message that your boss will fire you for taking risks unless you buy their hardware is communicated with the subtlety of a solar eclipse. As for the RAID point, you'd very much want to find real data for that. I've heard similar folklore but have also heard plenty of lost data stories from enterprise disks in enterprise RAID. If I were building out a large storage farm, I'd strongly consider forgoing hardware RAID altogether and using something like ZFS so it'd be observable.
- wmf 12y ago
  Being optimized for RAID basically means TLER and possibly never spinning down.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  heard plenty of lost data stories from enterprise disks in enterprise RAID If you've ever worked with enterprise RAID, that should not surprise you! RAID is powerful, but also so easy to botch...