They don’t have much of one left as it is.
It’s what happens with limited competition and no real repercussions from poor behavior that takes them in billions.
It’s what happens with limited competition and no real repercussions from poor behavior that takes them in billions.
I had one of the Deathstar drives that I started getting I/O errors on, so I went to replace it. When I was taking it out of the system I realized it was quite hot to the touch. This was a mini tower system and I had two of the 5" bays open, so I closed them off with cardboard, left the original drive in the system and booted it back up, and it ran without errors for a couple three years after that.
The biggest trouble with WD drives (at least pre 2015) was quality of the power. If you had a good PSU you wouldn't had a problem with WD. If you had some shit like Thermaltake...
I had a case when TT PSU consistently broke RAID10, because there were too much USB devices. Replaced with a proper PSU with the same rate and everything went fine.
Samsung SSDs are another darling of the gaming community that has produced a parade of defective products over the last decade. Literally since the 830 series I think there has only been one or two models without a massive firmware defect or faulty flash.
Isn't it funny that Backblaze finds Seagate fairly high in failures, but keeps going with them. But they are optimizing something different than I was. I was managing fairly small clusters, in the 10-150 node range. I considered it fairly expensive to have a drive failure, even if we used "remote hands" to replace the drive, we'd spend easy a couple hours on a drive failure between replacing, rebuilding, verifying, procurement and testing replacement drives. We ended up using mostly pairs of Deskstars between 2000 and 2010 when I was dealing with most of my mechanical drives.
We have been using Samsung Pro and Evo 860 drives at my current job, probably have 40-50 of them, and have had good luck with them. But, I'm starting to wonder if we should rely on them based on the discussions here. We only really use them in dev and staging, production is largely Intel.
I only recall one Samsung failure I've had, I had one as a ZFS log/cache drive for ~3 years and it started reporting errors.
I also agree with your point that you're optimizing for something different than backblaze. Same for a lot of homelab users. High failure rates on seagate? Umm, if they're sensitive that actually might make them worse in consumer service if they actually do fail all the time. Your whole disk (possibly array, hope you had backups) can go down and some of these failure rates have been absurd, it's like 130% annualized failure rate (everything is dying within 8 months) on the worst of it. And it's just consistently always seagate that is fucking up and while I'm sure This Time Is Different I have so far managed to evade all hard drive failure completely since I kicked seagate to the curb. including my seagate 3tb from the worst model (probably bet it's dead now tho lol) and an ancient seagate laptop hdd from my first laptop (conroe).
WD has mostly been fine except for the stealth SMR thing. I've never had a problem with any of my WD Reds, I knew what was on the market at the time (8TB red and hgst white label heliums) and I bought a bunch (8x8tb for $135/dr, it was cheap) and shucked them, and I got those exact models and it was fine. I should spin up my old USB 3.0 raid array and see if it spins, 4xWD Red 2TB as well, never been a problem (and that was 5400rpm). Toshiba has also been fantastic in terms of quality, and the X300 and N300 are basically the same in all respects other than name (the bit error stuff is bullshit). Toshiba has much smaller volume than either of the other two, but, I love their products when they're available and price-competitive, they've done great for me.
Personally for HDDs I just bought some HGST helium 14tb SAS3s from serverpartdeals for $135 a pop. the fanout of a SAS controller is nice in my environment anyway. that's gonna be my cold storage to migrate off 8x8 - I don't see a reason to run 6+2, I do see a reason to run 3+1 and just increase capacity and have alternate backups of important stuff.
You can also just buy 7.92TB enterprise U.2 2.5" TLC NVME drives for around $350, but then you need a trimode adapter (if SAS) to run them. But that's preferable to me rather than running consumer M.2 NVMe at $170-200 for 4TB. You can also run them off pcie adapter cards or M.2 slots (with riser cable) of course, but, they do run hot and I like the fanout factor, not like I'm ever going to hit anything super hard.
What do you mean? The SSD space is pretty competitive. If you go on pcpartpicker.com and search for SSDs you see dozens of brands. Any company can slap together an SSD by soldering a controller and commodity flash together.
That's kind of why I trust and prefer Samsung (yes, despite the firmware woes) and Micron (aka Crucial) for SSDs. Kioxia too, if we're talking enterprise.
They're all in the business of making the actual NAND and maybe also the controller.
Yes, it'd be nice to have more vendors like this, but you don't necessarily build a more robust industry just by having more vendors that buy NAND and a controller, make a few firmware tweaks for differentiation, and slap together a design based on an app note.
If Samsung made flash that only worked with Samsung controllers and Samsung-exclusive PCB designs, they'd have a far smaller addressable market.
I'm surprised we aren't seeing more flexibility out of the third-party market though. I could see someone saying "I'm willing to spend $100 for the most bestest possible 256Gb SSD for an industrial use case", and they'd sell you the parts that are normally sold as a 2TB MLC drive, but with a controller permalocked to using it all in psuedo-SLC cache mode, for example.
This is ignoring that there was a market for flash before we had NVME SSD controllers, and that there still is one.
NVME is a big chunk of where flash goes now, but I don't think vertical integration is going to make flash disappear in the secondary market.
In any case, -- yes, it's good to have a lot of manufacturers around for the industry. But it may not be as safe of a bet to buy from those other guys. There's enough gotchas in the design and support, and there's also the whole issue of supply chains and component quality.
As such, by avoiding recently-released drives, I've had nothing but positive experiences with my fifteen or so Samsung drives, including several models that originally shipped with serious firmware bugs.
While essentially obsolete at this point, I've also had excellent long-term experiences with (pre-WD) HGST SAS SSDs that use third-party (Intel) flash.
https://www.kingston.com/en/solutions/embedded-and-industria...
> The first generation V300 (which was sampled to media) used Toshiba's 19nm Toggle-Mode 2.0 NAND but some time ago Kingston silently switched to Micron's 20nm asynchronous NAND. The difference between the two is that the Toggle-Mode 2.0 interface in the Toshiba NAND is good for up to 200MB/s, whereas the asynchronous interface is usually good for only ~50MB/s. The reason I say usually is that Kingston wasn't willing to go into details about the speed of the asynchronous NAND they use and the ONFI spec doesn't list maximum bandwidth for the single data rate (i.e. asynchronous) NAND. However, even though we lack the specifics of the asynchronous NAND, it's certain that we are dealing with slower NAND here and Kingston admitted that the Micron NAND isn't capable of the same performance as the older Toshiba NAND.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ss...
[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/review/kingston-kc3000/
[2] https://www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/?f&controller=Phison+E...
I try to always buy from different vendors, but in this case I had no choice but to buy 2 drives of the same model.
https://tweakers.net/interne-harde-schijven/vergelijken/#fil...
I even used PCPartPicker for this PC build but for some reason it didn't occur to me to search for possible drives there to see what other stores could have them besides my usual stores (also I avoid Amazon for anything related to computers).
Thank you for removing my tunnel vision.
(I guess it might be slower for big transfers, but since you’re probably going to keep frequently-accessed files on an SSD, that shouldn’t be a huge problem either)
For my use case it's just Yet Another Different Place (tm) to keep another copy of some files, so I can tolerate low performance if it means it's cheaper.
Since I'm still learning and don't have enough confidence in my abilities when it comes to storage reliability, I know that it's just a matter of time until I mess up and lose a few drives due to a silly mistake from my part.
Apparently, if you need to rebuild the array due to losing a drive, it will take so long (and stress the remaining drives so much) that the chances of losing another drive in the process are non-negligible, thereby losing the data on the entire array.
Therefore, it might be wise to consider CMR drives for your use case.
As a general tip, all three manufacturers have specific NAS-class drives, which cost a bit more but are more reliable and usually CMR:
- WD has their Red Plus/Pro line (the non-Plus/Pro Reds are SMR, so avoid those)
- Seagate has their Ironwolf (Pro) line
- Toshiba has their N300 line
edit: ah, you just have them in a mirror. In that case, the magnitude of the risk may be less as you only need to copy data once to rebuild. I’m not sure though as I’m not an expert on the topic.
Rule of thumb - drives with 16Mb (or less, but you probably don't want a 8Mb cache drive in 2023, lol) are CMR, drives with >128Mb cache are 99% SMR.
And look at my sibling comment
> It certainly seems that way. Earlier this year I was looking for internal 2.5" HDDs with more than 1TB of capacity, and I could only find Seagate drives.
By the way, I'm shocked that someone would put a SMR HDD into a laptop. Most laptops already had slow disks when CMR was used, but with SMR, I don't even want to think of the results.
Fair assumption.
> [...] laptop [...]
If you said this because of any message from me, then I probably should have given more context.
This was for a desktop PC upgrade, in a Corsair 5000D case. The OS (FreeBSD), user files, and almost everything is in M.2 (two of them, in a ZFS mirror). I just wanted a mechanical drive where I could send ZFS snapshots, local git mirrors, and some other rarely-read rarely-overwritten files (stuff like also videos/epubs/etc that I occasionally serve over HTTP). The purpose is just having as much storage as cheap as possible, and more conveniently than an external USB HDD (which I also have and use for backups, but I don't want to keep it connected to the PC).
The initial plan was to use 3.5" HDDs because the 5000D case technically supports them, but while actually building it and saw the PSU cables my noob lazy self thought how much of a PITA it would be to actually use 3.5" HDDs (or how ugly it would look if I put them in a different place than intended).
So the plan changed to using the 2.5" mounts, and here I am now.
I'm currently working on building a NAS (separate from this Corsair 5000D desktop build), so soon-ish I should be able to just use that NAS for these files, and use the free 2.5" mounts for SSDs to increase the system ZFS pool.
Hopefully this additional context clarifies things.
Sadly, the problem still exists even for a simple mirror.
Though it can be mitigated by configuring a slow rebuild rate, so the new drive would have the time to perform the maintenance.
[1] https://tweakers.net/solid-state-drives/vergelijken/#filter:...
I didn't purchase it but thought it would have similar boot times to a regular HDD, which is only a few seconds more of a delay than a SATA SSD.
Nope this was one of the 8TB WD SMR's and takes about 10 times as long to boot compared to regular HDD. Still that's only a few minutes total and it's easy to just boot a few minutes earlier before I want to use that particular PC. Once Windows is initially loaded into memory (against upstream return data being slowly written to the SMR) it mostly works like normal after that.
Plus when you've got terabytes there's plenty of room for a number of 64GB partitions to install various bootable OS's in, without hardly compromising the major amount of free space you have left over for bulk storage in the large partition(s).