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the critical assumption in this post seems to be that drive speed was the only rate-limiting factor when they were collecting data... but as i understood the po
by justcommenting 12y ago
the critical assumption in this post seems to be that drive speed was the only rate-limiting factor when they were collecting data... but as i understood the post, it seemed like perimeter load-balancing, sata controller/nic load, and/or customer usage patterns could be responsible for some of the differences they observed.
- lsc 12y agoYou have to screw up a storage system pretty good to have something other than the hard drives be the limiting factor.
- asdfaoeu 12y agoTrue but that doesn't imply you run at capacity all the time.
- justcommenting 12y agothis is generally true, but even small variations in other factors could propagate through a complex architecture to account for some of the differences presented here, especially over time. these data are still useful, but some of the caveats could be made more explicit. similarly, most drive benchmarks are 'artificial' in any number of ways and come with another set of caveats. since drive testing is already part of backblaze's process for putting drives into production, it could be especially interesting to compare and contrast performance data from testing with data from production use. i pick these nits because real-world storage performance info seems like a valuable public good (particularly for enterprise and enterprise-like usage of consumer drives), and i'm grateful to backblaze for offering it up.
- SamReidHughes 12y agoIt's pretty easy to have software to be the limiting factor, such that you aren't taking full advantage of your throughput because the data's not there yet.
- Tepix 12y agoExactly. I found this particular blog post weaker than their previous, highly interesting ones.