3 ms·

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 on

by 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.

by atYevP 11y ago

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.