6 ms·

"At some point in the next few years we are going to start getting HDD failures on our blade server. It has ~30 hard drives plugged into it after all (

"At some point in the next few years we are going to start getting HDD failures on our blade server. It has ~30 hard drives plugged into it after all (and ~12 SSDs as well). When that begins to happen I will probably do a wholesale replacement of all HDDs with SSDs. Once that is done I really expect failure rates to drop to virtually nil for the next ~20-30 years. And the blade server is so ridiculously fast that we probably won't have any good reason to replace it for at least a decade, or ever (though perhaps we will add a second awesome blade server at some point, who knows?)." That's taking the long view. :-)

Jolijn 12y ago
Is hardware (motherboard, CPU, memory) that good nowadays that one can expect it to last 30 years. I don't think it's designed with that kind of lifetime in mind.
- dperny 12y ago
  I mean, this is server hardware. One of the major differences between server hardware and desktop hardware is build quality. I've got a ten-year-old 1/2U rack server sitting in a closet that I bought for pennies at a surplus auction that still runs great.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - jethro_tell 12y ago
    Server hardware is usually obsolete long before it stops working.
  - mahyarm 12y ago
    But would it really last 30 years with such things as lead-free solder?
    - moe 12y ago
      We will probably have to wait 30 years to really know. FWIW, lots of hardware from ~30 years ago still works. I have a 27 year old Amiga500 that still boots fine (many of the floppy disks have become unreadable, though). You can buy fully working vintage computers much older than that on eBay.
      - vacri 12y ago
        30 years of constant/daily use is different from a few years of use, then pulling out of mothballs as a curio every now and then.
    - sokoloff 12y ago
      A server that's 10 years old now was likely made with leaded solder.
  - eitland 12y ago
    I've seen DL380 G5 giving in a few years ago already. (I still love those machines except they seem to boot slower each generation.)
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  To my knowledge, the most common guarantee target is 5 years. Equipment can last much longer or much shorter, both as a function of chance and of workload. 30 years would be exceptional if the machine spent its life at the 5-year-target load.
- beachstartup 12y ago
  we don't exactly run the biggest operation, but in our experience the most common failure items in thousands-of-years-of-cumulative-uptime is network interface cards (or on-motherboard network interfaces) and hdd's. RAID controllers fail left and right. we keep tons of spares around. ssd's fail few and far between, cpus basically do not fail, and memory can go bad but it's exceedingly rare and easy to fix. psu's fail but are easy to fix in modern computers as well (slide-out, redundant, etc.) having said all that, heat is the primary killer of hardware. if you run a lot of equipment in a dense environment, get a laser thermometer and find your hot spots and fix them with some industrial fans or move your gear around. once your stuff gets hot anything can fail in weird and mysterious ways.
  - Matumio 12y ago
    How do network cards fail? Simply as if you cut the link? Or can you see error counters increasing and sporadic frame loss that gets worse over time?
    - danpat 12y ago
      Depends on which bit fails, but increases in packet loss are a common early symptom of small components no longer acting within their specs. Network cards are subject to lots of signal phenomena that are rare inside the chassis. Long cables are pretty good antennas for certain types of RF signals, so there are all kinds of electrical noises, induced power spikes and other miscellaneous garbage that the network card has to tolerate. Well-shielded cables can help protect the card, but it's definitely one interface that's subject to a bit more electrical abuse than the rest. Components that have been stressed beyond their tolerances a few times can result in things like signal filters having a lower noise threshold, which makes it harder for the card to pick out the signal from the noise, which leads to more packet loss. After enough abuse, the threshold drops below the usable level and communications halt. There are lots of factors involved, such as shielding, proximity to nearby radiators, bend radius in cables, cable length, temperature, etc, etc. Whenever I delve into this world, I'm often amazed that anything works at all.
    - beachstartup 12y ago
rasz_pl 12y ago
No, thats naive view. SSDs do fail, and they tend to do it without any warning. Author thinks he discovered magic. Paradoxically SSDs from two years ago have better endurance than brand new drives now, and a lot better than SSDs in 5 years (unless something big happens).
- vacri 12y ago
  It reminds me of the "burnable CDs will keep your data for 30 years!" phase we went through. Turns out that's not so reliable after all.
- dillondf 12y ago
  No, nobody is magicking up any fairy dust here. The author (which is me) is looking at things realistically. My maintenance costs just from a time perspective are already radically lower. In anycase, so as long as the SSD is powered and thus able to rewrite blocks as bits start to go bad (creating some wear in the process but not a whole lot compared to normal operation), the actual data will be retained for significantly longer than 10 years. Unpowered data retention (where there is nothing there checking for and rewriting blocks whos bits start to go bad) depends on cell wear. I didn't pull up the chip specs but my recollection is that it is 10 years for new cells and 1-2 years for a relatively worn cell. Depends on temperature of course. That means I can pull a SSD and shelve it without too much worry for a relatively long time, something that cannot be said for any hard drive. CD's corrode from the inside out, primarily due to air trapped in the holes I believe. Even though it is laser burned there is no real care taken in constructing the plastic sides or metal film to keep up air so when it gets vaporized the oxygen sticks around and starts corroding the metal. Or the plastic gets fuzzy from UV exposure or age. Totally different ballgame. Hard drives have even worse problems if left unpowered. I used to pull backup drives and shelve them, but their life spans are radically lowered if left unpowered on a shelf for 6 months and then replugged into a machine at a later time. I'm sure some HDD expert can say why. So I stopped doing that. Now the backup drives stay powered on 24x7. Hard drives seem to have a limited life span whether you use them or not. I have tons of old HDDs sitting around, some well over 20 years old in fact. If I plug an old HDD in I can sometimes read the data off before the whole thing turns into a brick. I mostly use them to test disk driver error handling. SSDs left sitting around can always be reformatted (i.e. just using TRIM to clean out the whole thing then start writing to it fresh). Their wear limit is based on rewrite cycles rather than how long they've been sitting around. HDDs are physically destroyed, you don't get a fresh start by reformatting an old HDD. -Matt

Jolijn 12y ago

Is hardware (motherboard, CPU, memory) that good nowadays that one can expect it to last 30 years. I don't think it's designed with that kind of lifetime in mind.

dperny 12y ago
I mean, this is server hardware. One of the major differences between server hardware and desktop hardware is build quality. I've got a ten-year-old 1/2U rack server sitting in a closet that I bought for pennies at a surplus auction that still runs great.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jethro_tell 12y ago
  Server hardware is usually obsolete long before it stops working.
- mahyarm 12y ago
  But would it really last 30 years with such things as lead-free solder?
  - moe 12y ago
    We will probably have to wait 30 years to really know. FWIW, lots of hardware from ~30 years ago still works. I have a 27 year old Amiga500 that still boots fine (many of the floppy disks have become unreadable, though). You can buy fully working vintage computers much older than that on eBay.
    - vacri 12y ago
      30 years of constant/daily use is different from a few years of use, then pulling out of mothballs as a curio every now and then.
  - sokoloff 12y ago
    A server that's 10 years old now was likely made with leaded solder.
- eitland 12y ago
  I've seen DL380 G5 giving in a few years ago already. (I still love those machines except they seem to boot slower each generation.)
sliverstorm 12y ago
To my knowledge, the most common guarantee target is 5 years. Equipment can last much longer or much shorter, both as a function of chance and of workload. 30 years would be exceptional if the machine spent its life at the 5-year-target load.
beachstartup 12y ago
we don't exactly run the biggest operation, but in our experience the most common failure items in thousands-of-years-of-cumulative-uptime is network interface cards (or on-motherboard network interfaces) and hdd's. RAID controllers fail left and right. we keep tons of spares around. ssd's fail few and far between, cpus basically do not fail, and memory can go bad but it's exceedingly rare and easy to fix. psu's fail but are easy to fix in modern computers as well (slide-out, redundant, etc.) having said all that, heat is the primary killer of hardware. if you run a lot of equipment in a dense environment, get a laser thermometer and find your hot spots and fix them with some industrial fans or move your gear around. once your stuff gets hot anything can fail in weird and mysterious ways.
- Matumio 12y ago
  How do network cards fail? Simply as if you cut the link? Or can you see error counters increasing and sporadic frame loss that gets worse over time?
  - danpat 12y ago
    Depends on which bit fails, but increases in packet loss are a common early symptom of small components no longer acting within their specs. Network cards are subject to lots of signal phenomena that are rare inside the chassis. Long cables are pretty good antennas for certain types of RF signals, so there are all kinds of electrical noises, induced power spikes and other miscellaneous garbage that the network card has to tolerate. Well-shielded cables can help protect the card, but it's definitely one interface that's subject to a bit more electrical abuse than the rest. Components that have been stressed beyond their tolerances a few times can result in things like signal filters having a lower noise threshold, which makes it harder for the card to pick out the signal from the noise, which leads to more packet loss. After enough abuse, the threshold drops below the usable level and communications halt. There are lots of factors involved, such as shielding, proximity to nearby radiators, bend radius in cables, cable length, temperature, etc, etc. Whenever I delve into this world, I'm often amazed that anything works at all.
  - beachstartup 12y ago

rasz_pl 12y ago

No, thats naive view. SSDs do fail, and they tend to do it without any warning. Author thinks he discovered magic. Paradoxically SSDs from two years ago have better endurance than brand new drives now, and a lot better than SSDs in 5 years (unless something big happens).

vacri 12y ago
It reminds me of the "burnable CDs will keep your data for 30 years!" phase we went through. Turns out that's not so reliable after all.
dillondf 12y ago
No, nobody is magicking up any fairy dust here. The author (which is me) is looking at things realistically. My maintenance costs just from a time perspective are already radically lower. In anycase, so as long as the SSD is powered and thus able to rewrite blocks as bits start to go bad (creating some wear in the process but not a whole lot compared to normal operation), the actual data will be retained for significantly longer than 10 years. Unpowered data retention (where there is nothing there checking for and rewriting blocks whos bits start to go bad) depends on cell wear. I didn't pull up the chip specs but my recollection is that it is 10 years for new cells and 1-2 years for a relatively worn cell. Depends on temperature of course. That means I can pull a SSD and shelve it without too much worry for a relatively long time, something that cannot be said for any hard drive. CD's corrode from the inside out, primarily due to air trapped in the holes I believe. Even though it is laser burned there is no real care taken in constructing the plastic sides or metal film to keep up air so when it gets vaporized the oxygen sticks around and starts corroding the metal. Or the plastic gets fuzzy from UV exposure or age. Totally different ballgame. Hard drives have even worse problems if left unpowered. I used to pull backup drives and shelve them, but their life spans are radically lowered if left unpowered on a shelf for 6 months and then replugged into a machine at a later time. I'm sure some HDD expert can say why. So I stopped doing that. Now the backup drives stay powered on 24x7. Hard drives seem to have a limited life span whether you use them or not. I have tons of old HDDs sitting around, some well over 20 years old in fact. If I plug an old HDD in I can sometimes read the data off before the whole thing turns into a brick. I mostly use them to test disk driver error handling. SSDs left sitting around can always be reformatted (i.e. just using TRIM to clean out the whole thing then start writing to it fresh). Their wear limit is based on rewrite cycles rather than how long they've been sitting around. HDDs are physically destroyed, you don't get a fresh start by reformatting an old HDD. -Matt