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Yev from Backblaze here -> The drive manufacturer won't do it for us (at least not at our scale). We're currently chatting to some channel retailers that would

by atYevP 11y ago

Yev from Backblaze here -> The drive manufacturer won't do it for us (at least not at our scale). We're currently chatting to some channel retailers that would be able to do it for us and allow us to scale a little bit. It was discouraging us from buying in larger quantities, but if the price of the drive + labeling works out, we'll try some larger orders.

DannyBee 11y ago
The drives don't get delivered in pods for you, right? So why is this not just part of the "take all drives from large box/crate/etc" process for the drives? IE whoever is taking them out of boxes puts them down, one by one, in a simple little labeling machine that slaps label on them (and records into a stupid database the label). If you want something more advanced, labeling machine has small camera that takes picture of top of drive for further identification, you can process and store all the barcoded info that exist in the image (unlike OCR, the barcodes should be 100% accurate)
- atYevP 11y ago
  We do not get them delivered in pods no, we put them in at the datacenter. We don't do it because of the time constraints. Lets say it takes 30 seconds to do one individual drive. With 45 drives in a chassis that's 22 minutes per pod, and we get a ton of pods and drives delivered at once. Our datacenter techs are busy enough as it is, so if we can offload them, we try to. Now, if these drives were inexpensive and had a 0% failure rate over 4 years and the manufacturer/retail chain supplier still refused to put them on, yea we'd hire someone to do just labeling and do it ourselves, but for now the math doesn't work out.
  - ChuckMcM 11y ago
    Yev, if you're taking a drive out of the anti-static bag and installing it in a machine it takes slightly less than 3 seconds to pull an asset tag bar code off a sheet of printed labels and stick it on the drive. Two scans of the drive asset tag, serial number on the label, and poof you are done. A very large consumer of drives at a previous employer :-) did this pretty efficiently. When we expanded our cluster for Blekko we did this for the 5000 drives we got from Western digital (well the scanning, we didn't really need an asset tag) and it goes really quickly with a code scanner in hand and a python script recording the values.
    - atYevP 11y ago
      Sure, maybe my math was off, I'm not a datacenter guy, they are very efficient ;-) It comes down to cost/time. We did small-scale tests and they went pretty well. We're hoping to avoid the manual process on our end, but if we can't get a distributor to label them and it makes financial sense to buy the Toshiba's, we'll do it ourselves :)
  - moe 11y ago
    We don't do it because of the time constraints. Lets say it takes 30 seconds to do one individual drive. But in your article you claim that the unlabeled Toshiba drives lengthen the maintenance time by "a few minutes" every time they fail. Since all drives eventually fail, wouldn't it make sense to trade those "few minutes" at the end of the lifecycle for a constant 30 seconds at the beginning?
    - atYevP 11y ago
      Certainly, at least mathematically. If we ramp up the Toshiba purchases and cannot get them pre-labeled, we'll definitely do it on our end, though we think we'll be able to get them labeled ahead of time from some channel partners. At least we hope, signs look good :)
      - bobdvb 11y ago
        My experience of buying 20k disks at a time is that even those volumes aren't significant to the manufacturers. So essentially you are asking the distributor to label them. Given that you have multiple vendors and you also seem to have a risk even in handling any drive, I would suggest that asset tagging the disks and using a bluetooth scanner, or android data entry app, would make sense for all your disk assets. You can then automatically document and track the entire lifecycle of a disk live, as it is inserted or removed. Your refusal to generate your own labels seems strange.
monochromatic 11y ago
Sounds like a job for a temp.
- wcchandler 11y ago
  I was thinking an intern, but yeah... sounds like a great way for somebody low-level to get their foot in the door.
sunstone 11y ago
Hi Yev, just want to say that I love these posts that Backblaze does regarding drive reliability. Thanks.
- atYevP 11y ago
  Cool! Well, that's why we write them, people seem to dig them! And we have a lot of stats and data from our experiences to share, so it's mutually beneficial!

by atYevP 11y ago

DannyBee 11y ago

The drives don't get delivered in pods for you, right? So why is this not just part of the "take all drives from large box/crate/etc" process for the drives? IE whoever is taking them out of boxes puts them down, one by one, in a simple little labeling machine that slaps label on them (and records into a stupid database the label). If you want something more advanced, labeling machine has small camera that takes picture of top of drive for further identification, you can process and store all the barcoded info that exist in the image (unlike OCR, the barcodes should be 100% accurate)

atYevP 11y ago
We do not get them delivered in pods no, we put them in at the datacenter. We don't do it because of the time constraints. Lets say it takes 30 seconds to do one individual drive. With 45 drives in a chassis that's 22 minutes per pod, and we get a ton of pods and drives delivered at once. Our datacenter techs are busy enough as it is, so if we can offload them, we try to. Now, if these drives were inexpensive and had a 0% failure rate over 4 years and the manufacturer/retail chain supplier still refused to put them on, yea we'd hire someone to do just labeling and do it ourselves, but for now the math doesn't work out.
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  Yev, if you're taking a drive out of the anti-static bag and installing it in a machine it takes slightly less than 3 seconds to pull an asset tag bar code off a sheet of printed labels and stick it on the drive. Two scans of the drive asset tag, serial number on the label, and poof you are done. A very large consumer of drives at a previous employer :-) did this pretty efficiently. When we expanded our cluster for Blekko we did this for the 5000 drives we got from Western digital (well the scanning, we didn't really need an asset tag) and it goes really quickly with a code scanner in hand and a python script recording the values.
  - atYevP 11y ago
    Sure, maybe my math was off, I'm not a datacenter guy, they are very efficient ;-) It comes down to cost/time. We did small-scale tests and they went pretty well. We're hoping to avoid the manual process on our end, but if we can't get a distributor to label them and it makes financial sense to buy the Toshiba's, we'll do it ourselves :)
- moe 11y ago
  We don't do it because of the time constraints. Lets say it takes 30 seconds to do one individual drive. But in your article you claim that the unlabeled Toshiba drives lengthen the maintenance time by "a few minutes" every time they fail. Since all drives eventually fail, wouldn't it make sense to trade those "few minutes" at the end of the lifecycle for a constant 30 seconds at the beginning?
  - atYevP 11y ago
    Certainly, at least mathematically. If we ramp up the Toshiba purchases and cannot get them pre-labeled, we'll definitely do it on our end, though we think we'll be able to get them labeled ahead of time from some channel partners. At least we hope, signs look good :)
    - bobdvb 11y ago
      My experience of buying 20k disks at a time is that even those volumes aren't significant to the manufacturers. So essentially you are asking the distributor to label them. Given that you have multiple vendors and you also seem to have a risk even in handling any drive, I would suggest that asset tagging the disks and using a bluetooth scanner, or android data entry app, would make sense for all your disk assets. You can then automatically document and track the entire lifecycle of a disk live, as it is inserted or removed. Your refusal to generate your own labels seems strange.

monochromatic 11y ago

Sounds like a job for a temp.

wcchandler 11y ago
I was thinking an intern, but yeah... sounds like a great way for somebody low-level to get their foot in the door.

sunstone 11y ago

Hi Yev, just want to say that I love these posts that Backblaze does regarding drive reliability. Thanks.

atYevP 11y ago
Cool! Well, that's why we write them, people seem to dig them! And we have a lot of stats and data from our experiences to share, so it's mutually beneficial!