5 ms·

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 t

by 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".
spindritf 12y ago
unlike consumer drives which statistically are never replaced under guarantee They're never replaced because regular consumers statistically don't ask for replacement and simply eat the loss?
- VLM 12y ago
  Yes. I have an old 250 GB sitting on my desk at home. Waste the time arguing on the phone and getting a RMA and package it up and drive out to ship it back to get a "new" 250G drive (uh ... thanks?), or order a new 2TB, about the same cost. And this is only with technologically inclined consumers, most are just going to return the whole computer or get a new computer. At a business that is probably some MBA metric and has been budgeted for and is salaried anyway, and you need to prove I'm not just taking drives home to put in my basement server, so they have to be destroyed or sent back, and there may or may not be PCI / CPNI type concerns, so yeah, they get sent back.
- theworst 12y ago
  With a shorter guarantee, consumer drives have less time in which to fail and be replaced without charge.
- justcommenting 12y ago
  i am a statistical anomaly, then, as someone who tracks warranty expirations in a spreadsheet and always makes sure to wipe & sell old drives before they go out of warranty. in the 20 years i've owned hard drives, i've always had failed drives replaced! drives with longer warranties generally cost more in the consumer segment, and data like this could help people identify the "sweet spot" balancing cost with risk of failure, warranty length, and depreciation curves for storage. my "ancedata" suggests somewhere between 2 and 3 year warranties seems about right for consumer drives these days...
  - jmulho 12y ago
    In twenty years, how many hard drives have you had, and how many failed? I've had eight or ten (counting home and work) and just one failed. I had one I used daily for over a decade.
jwr 12y ago
Do you have any data to back up any of these claims? Because now I have a problem: should I believe guys who have been running 38 petabytes of storage for several years now and regularly present the data they gathered, or should I believe you?
- VLM 12y ago
  I've read his blog posts before. He's a good author. I don't believe anything factual/technical in my post disagrees with reality or any of his historical posts. I am open to the idea I'm misinterpreting how he presents enterprise vs consumer firmware loads. I assume its open knowledge that their secret sauce is using consumer hardware so assumptions about 15K fibre channel isn't relevant.
  - gtaylor 12y ago
    > Do you have any data to back up any of these claims? Can you respond to this directly, please?
ghshephard 12y ago
Are you claiming: o Enterprise and Consumer Drives are the Same Hardware. o Enterprise Firmware causes the drive to fail fast on physical errors rather than endlessly retrying. o Enterprise Drives are more likely to be RMA'd? Do you have any citations, evidence, reports, articles, white papers, research - anything (beyond random anecdotes, or miscellaneous blog entries) to back up these claims?
- pixl97 12y ago
  >Enterprise Firmware causes the drive to fail fast on physical errors rather than endlessly retrying. TLER http://features.techworld.com/storage/1019/what-is-time-limited-error-recovery/ http://features.techworld.com/storage/1019/what-is-time-limi... TLER is exactly what you want in a RAID. You have another copy of the data in question on the array, why fight for it on a disk when the data may be corrupt anyway.
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    Fair enough - that's a good article, though it explicitly calls out "RE" drives - "RAID Edition" - which I can imagine having particularly properties associated with "RAID" behavior. What I'm interesting in hearing, (honestly - I not doubting right now, just interested in being educated) - is if anyone authoritative has described "Enterprise" drives as having these behaviors.
moe 12y ago
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. Except that also only works "most of the time". Anyone who works at scale with drives and (RAID-)Controllers knows that even "enterprise" drives can and do take entire controllers down. It's not uncommon to lose a full set of daisy chained JBODs to a single disk acting funny. Consequently, and since storage clusters have to be redundant at the node-level anyway, it makes a lot of sense to skip the markup for enterprise firmwares and instead design for quick node failure detection and ejection (short timeouts).
rblatz 12y ago
They do have WD Red drives in the comparison which aren't enterprise drives, but they also have the fail fast feature, I believe it is called TLER.
linker3000 12y ago
Seriously, no. Wrong in almost every way. Disclaimer: HGST employee. I'll leave this non-HGST (Intel) link (PDF) for reference: http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/enterprise_class_versus_desktop_class_hard_drives_.pdf http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/ent...

by VLM 12y ago

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".

spindritf 12y ago

unlike consumer drives which statistically are never replaced under guarantee They're never replaced because regular consumers statistically don't ask for replacement and simply eat the loss?

VLM 12y ago
Yes. I have an old 250 GB sitting on my desk at home. Waste the time arguing on the phone and getting a RMA and package it up and drive out to ship it back to get a "new" 250G drive (uh ... thanks?), or order a new 2TB, about the same cost. And this is only with technologically inclined consumers, most are just going to return the whole computer or get a new computer. At a business that is probably some MBA metric and has been budgeted for and is salaried anyway, and you need to prove I'm not just taking drives home to put in my basement server, so they have to be destroyed or sent back, and there may or may not be PCI / CPNI type concerns, so yeah, they get sent back.
theworst 12y ago
With a shorter guarantee, consumer drives have less time in which to fail and be replaced without charge.
justcommenting 12y ago
i am a statistical anomaly, then, as someone who tracks warranty expirations in a spreadsheet and always makes sure to wipe & sell old drives before they go out of warranty. in the 20 years i've owned hard drives, i've always had failed drives replaced! drives with longer warranties generally cost more in the consumer segment, and data like this could help people identify the "sweet spot" balancing cost with risk of failure, warranty length, and depreciation curves for storage. my "ancedata" suggests somewhere between 2 and 3 year warranties seems about right for consumer drives these days...
- jmulho 12y ago
  In twenty years, how many hard drives have you had, and how many failed? I've had eight or ten (counting home and work) and just one failed. I had one I used daily for over a decade.

jwr 12y ago

Do you have any data to back up any of these claims? Because now I have a problem: should I believe guys who have been running 38 petabytes of storage for several years now and regularly present the data they gathered, or should I believe you?

VLM 12y ago
I've read his blog posts before. He's a good author. I don't believe anything factual/technical in my post disagrees with reality or any of his historical posts. I am open to the idea I'm misinterpreting how he presents enterprise vs consumer firmware loads. I assume its open knowledge that their secret sauce is using consumer hardware so assumptions about 15K fibre channel isn't relevant.
- gtaylor 12y ago
  > Do you have any data to back up any of these claims? Can you respond to this directly, please?

ghshephard 12y ago

Are you claiming: o Enterprise and Consumer Drives are the Same Hardware. o Enterprise Firmware causes the drive to fail fast on physical errors rather than endlessly retrying. o Enterprise Drives are more likely to be RMA'd? Do you have any citations, evidence, reports, articles, white papers, research - anything (beyond random anecdotes, or miscellaneous blog entries) to back up these claims?

pixl97 12y ago
>Enterprise Firmware causes the drive to fail fast on physical errors rather than endlessly retrying. TLER http://features.techworld.com/storage/1019/what-is-time-limited-error-recovery/ http://features.techworld.com/storage/1019/what-is-time-limi... TLER is exactly what you want in a RAID. You have another copy of the data in question on the array, why fight for it on a disk when the data may be corrupt anyway.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Fair enough - that's a good article, though it explicitly calls out "RE" drives - "RAID Edition" - which I can imagine having particularly properties associated with "RAID" behavior. What I'm interesting in hearing, (honestly - I not doubting right now, just interested in being educated) - is if anyone authoritative has described "Enterprise" drives as having these behaviors.

moe 12y ago

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. Except that also only works "most of the time". Anyone who works at scale with drives and (RAID-)Controllers knows that even "enterprise" drives can and do take entire controllers down. It's not uncommon to lose a full set of daisy chained JBODs to a single disk acting funny. Consequently, and since storage clusters have to be redundant at the node-level anyway, it makes a lot of sense to skip the markup for enterprise firmwares and instead design for quick node failure detection and ejection (short timeouts).

rblatz 12y ago

They do have WD Red drives in the comparison which aren't enterprise drives, but they also have the fail fast feature, I believe it is called TLER.

linker3000 12y ago

Seriously, no. Wrong in almost every way. Disclaimer: HGST employee. I'll leave this non-HGST (Intel) link (PDF) for reference: http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/enterprise_class_versus_desktop_class_hard_drives_.pdf http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/ent...