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Now multiply that frequency against the ratio of machines Twitter has vs you.

You get massive DoS attacks pretty regularly? State sponsored hackers?

On a modest Hadoop cluster of 300 machines with 20 disks a piece, we replaced 3 hard disks a week.

Spindles? That sounds like a ridiculous amount burn rate - it should be no more than 5-10% a YEAR. Backblaze reports only 1.6% quarterly failure rate https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

Er actually missed its total 6k disks seems about right then

Is your stuff on the internet? I agree that systems that are 100% internal can get by for awhile without much maintenance, but anything on the internet is a completely different beast. Add in that Twitter is a huge target for DDoS, zero-days, etc..., and I don't see how anything just 'hums along' without near constant monitoring.