Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

There was a post from BackBlaze a year (?) or so back where they commented on the Toshiba low failure rate with something along the lines of "they seem really reliable, but we buy in bulk and just don't have enough offers at low price for those, otherwise we would buy a lot of them".

Well I run a couple dozen Synology NAS in professionnal setup, as well as two in personnal setup (mine and my parents'), and ever since that post I made the experiment of having almost 50% of all drives be Toshibas, and I have to say they do seem to be much more reliable (on the scale of "why do every other drive from Seagate and WD keep dying first, and often their replacement dies first too").

It is still a scale of use where it's mostly anecdotical rather than verifiable data, so don't take this fun comment for more than that. But I suspect a lot of people reading these posts are not interested for some large scale setup or anything like that but rather to know which drives to put in their home computer or NAS, and honestly I can highly recommend the Toshiba for that. They do tend to be a bit more expensive (around 10% more ? I buy them from ldlc.com and grosbill.com , french IT stores, no bulk buying or anything like that)

Of course no matter the brand never expect no failure and a Toshiba drive may just as much die in the first ten minutes so always plan for it.

Yev from Backblaze here -> Yea, the Toshiba drives are great! If the price was lower, they'd likely play a larger role in our hard drive mix!

If they need replacing less often, then presumably you’d be willing to spend more on them, so do I infer that they are sufficiently more expensive to wipe out the benefits of greater reliability?

Yev here -> Yes, that's basically the trade-off for us. Is the drive available and reliable vs. how much does it cost. One of the reasons we have so many Seagate drives is because they are available in abundance, are affordable for us, and have failure rates in-line with the other drives that we're testing.

I'm theorizing that one of the things Backblaze has optimized is the labor cost of drive replacement, yes?

So the reliability may be "worth more" to someone who pays a lot for remote-hands in a server farm somewhere, but not in this case.

Yev here -> we do have remote hands available in some cases, but we try to have our own teams in place where possible, but yes - it's one of the things we optimize on our end!

To what extent do you guys maintain drive diversity artificially? i.e. include higher % seagates just to diversify risk of one batch/type being bad news.

I don't buy in bulk or anything like that but the Toshiba seems to be reliably 5-10% more expensive than the same WD models on the french IT stores I use, mostly because WD and Seagate always have special offers on one of their drive or the other.

I suspect when buying in bulk like BB does the difference becomes even larger ? Also they seem to build so as not to care of the reliability of any drive (as long as it stays within acceptable range), so a gain that may seem massive for us low scale user may not be of much impact to them compared to the cost benefit.

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