[mythtv-users] BackBlaze hard drive study

[Calvin Dodge]

"... high temperature is not as strongly correlated to failure as we
typically expect."

In addition, Google did not see an "infant mortality" spike with new
drives.  Instead, they saw a linear failure rate over time for drives less
than 3 years old (the failure rate increases after 3 years, due to bearing
wear).

The Backblaze article DOES mention that the average age of the 1.5 TB
drives is 4 years (the "release date" tells you when a drive was first
produced, not when a specific drive was built). To me it's more significant
that BackBlaze's 4 TB Seagates average around 4 months in age, but have a
greater annual failure rate than their 1-year-old Hitachis.

I have one other semi-anecdotal bit of information to consider - my former
employer has their services hosted at Tummy.com (a major Colorado hosting
site), and Tummy swears by Hitachis. Since they have a fairly large number
of hard drives in use, and they DO have properly-configured ventilation,
etc., I grant them more credence than I do some consultant who probably
does NOT have equivalent experience.

Calvin Dodge

Calvin Dodge"


On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 12:06 AM, Karl Newman <newmank1 at asme.org> wrote:

> 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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