[mythtv-users] BackBlaze hard drive study

[Karl Newman]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Stephen P. Villano <
stephen.p.villano at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On 1/29/14, 9:23 PM, Gary Buhrmaster wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Craig Treleaven <ctreleaven at cogeco.ca>
> wrote:
> >> Very interesting analysis from running 25,000 consumer-class drives
> over 5
> >> years:
> >>
> >> http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/
> > A rather scathing response regard the statistical accuracy of this
> report:
> >
> http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-hardware/selecting-a-disk-drive-how-not-to-do-research-1.html
> > _______________________________________________
> >
> What I see is vendor data vs experiential data from one outfit that
> testing a ton of various inexpensive drives.
> As such, do we really want to trust an opinion that is based upon vendor
> ratings? Do we trust a tester who has no hard drive industry affiliation?
>
> Actually, neither.
> First, what was the HD temperature of each drive in each bundle in each
> unit during its testing?
> What was the ambient temperature of the rack, the array unit, etc?
>
> Those are really big deals, as we're talking about potentially cooking
> the hard drives, something unforgivable for any electronic device not
> designed to be cooked.
> And yes, I mean cooked. I've worked in far less than optimal
> environments, including server rooms that reached 105-110 degrees F and
> lousy ventilation, air conditioning performed by split air conditioner
> units designed for habitations, not a server room.
> We'll suffice it to say that we had significant loss of hardware,
> especially server fans and the occasional power supply.
> Add in the real difference between consumer hard drives and enterprise
> SAS drives, there's another really big difference.
> But, without temperature data, we really don't have a clue what was
> really going on.
> And to be blunt, I'll not trust my *own* word on it without a trainload
> of real numbers.
>

Actually, Google's drive reliability study (
http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf)
indicated that high temperature is not as strongly correlated to failure as
we typically expect. Unfortunately (I'm sure lawyers intervened) Google
doesn't name names.

Karl
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