Hacker News Reader

Comment by Llevel | Hacker News Reader

I chose to get 4 ST4000DM000 drives based on previous reports. Sure HGST drives never die, but it's cheaper to RMA or buy a single new drive if one fails, than the added cost of 4 reliable drives. Assuming only one fails, which is a risk I'm willing to take with my very non-mission-critical data.

I don't read this as 'which drive to buy' but more as 'which drive not to buy'.

View on HN

> HGST drives never die

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. I know you didn't mean that as an absolute, but I just want to point out 100% of drives fail. It's my OCD that makes me point this out. We have NEVER found a drive that lasted forever. There are two types of drives: 1) those that have already failed, and 2) those that are about to fail. For any data you would be annoyed to lose, you need three copies in three locations with three separate vendors (three different pieces of software that don't share any lines of code).

To be somewhat similarly OCD, if your software is controlling storage to each of those drives, then there are many shared LOC involved; indeed, this is the reason why async replication into separate clusters is always recommended for data which can't be lost.

18 disk zpool with three raidz2 vdevs, with 2 disks from 3 different vendors per vdev, bought in two batches per vendor and evenly spread across the case. That's about as paranoid as I consider practical for the homelab/online part of my storage needs.

Also, not sure there are three pieces of storage software that I trust and are readily available to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com