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Comment by freshyill | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if any of this actually applies to consumer-grade drives.

My wife's hard drive actually just died. It was 160 GB WD in a black 2006 MacBook. The drive itself was a replacement from 2007 since the original drive died just over a year into its life.

Stupidly, since her Time Machine backup was misbehaving, I reformatted it and set it to start over. I spent the weekend recovering her data—with a lot of success, so no big deal. At any rate, this machine is long past its expiration date. It's time for a MacBook Air with an SSD, once the tax refund comes in.

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Yev from Backblaze here -> All of our drives are consumer-grade. We try to avoid buying enterprise drives at all costs. These are all off-the-shelf internals and in some cases...externals that were made internal! :)

> and in some cases...externals that were made internal! :)

I remember reading about this a while back[1] (fun read!).

Have you guys noticed a big difference in life expectancy of the repurposed external drives or do they generally match up with their internal equivalents?

[1]: http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/10/09/backblaze_drive_farming...

Interestingly, we think they do as well if not better (http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/12/04/enterprise-drive-reliab...). We think it's because external drives are meant to be jostled around by Joe Schmo, so they do well in our storage pods, whereas internal drives and especially enterprise drives are meant to live in a perfectly Utopian environment.

Have you seen a different failure rate between the drives that were sold as internal vs. the drives that were sold as external and "shucked" ?

Not enough to measure, it turns out once you get their case off they are mostly the same. The real difference is "enterprise" grade vs "consumer" grade dries.

Do those quotation marks mean "enterprise labelled", such as the WD RE4-series? Are there good data on how they perform vs the consumer series? By good I mean like the data your company provided, samples of thousands of drives.

The MTBF is typically much higher than regular HDDs, and their reliability is probably at the level described for Hitachi (can't give actual stats though, my experience is limited to hundreds not thousands)

Those drives aren't designed for HDD farms though. They are meant to be used in environments where a failure is a big problem and paying a lot more for a bit more reliability is worth it. Like that 1U server you got in a datacenter with 2 disks in RAID1.

If you have thousands of disks replacing is part of the daily routine, and isn't an issue at all (as numbers suggest in article/comments)

That isn't why you buy enterprise drives. Or, at least, I've spent several Porsches worth of money that I could reasonably have spent on Porsches on enterprise drives, and that isn't why I bought enterprise drives.

I buy all enterprise drives. Not because I can't handle replacing a disk; I live within walking distance of the coresite santa clara location where most of my servers are, and actually kinda enjoy that sort of thing. (Yes, yes, I'm sick. But what of it?)

I pay double for 'enterprise grade' drives because more often than the consumer-grade drives, they fail clean.

That's the thing... what does it mean to have a drive "fail?" The vast majority of my failures with consumer grade drives just /degrade/ rather than outright failing. They get shittier and shittier over time. And yes, with sufficient software you can detect this and automatically fail them, but I don't have that. the "enterprise sata" stuff? More often than not, the things actually fail before they degrade to the point where I notice them causing problems with other things.

I buy enterprise grade, not because they last longer, (In fact, I see no evidence that they do) but because they tend to work or fail, whereas consumer grade drives exist on a continuum between "working" and "failing"

(Of course, even the enterprise stuff isn't 100%... but it's much better.)

Well, nowadays I buy them because that's the only way you get a 5 year warranty; I only build systems with 5 year design lifetimes (even for the parents; saves a lot of hassle).

Although I have seen some evidence of consumer grade drives "failing dirty". E.g. in 2002 I tried a couple of 5 year warranty Seagate Barracudas in a new machine; it didn't take long for one of them to outright fail a 4K portion of the disk. I actually wrote a little C program to recover everything but that one bit (and it was a file I could then recover the missing data from), and switched back to SCSI enterprise drives for my main system drives and haven't looked back (granted, those are as fast as I can buy, and that means SCSI enterprise). And that includes a couple of machines I built for a non-profit that are exactly what datphp describes.

And, yeah, these best of the best drives do fail, at least I had at least one of the Seagate Cheeta 10K drives I bought back in 2002 completely fail, I think both eventually, the 2nd after 5 years had passed.

>I actually wrote a little C program to recover everything but that one bit (and it was a file I could then recover the missing data from),

'ddrescue' is a program I use in similar situations. (not to discourage you from writing your own; doing that sort of thing leads to a deeper understanding of what is going on.)

I was still stuck in Windows (Windows 2000), and it was quite a bit faster to write the program than find a solution on the net like that on a live CD, download it, etc. Having started on C in 1979 (sic) I knew it cold by then.

But, yeah, confirming exactly what was the problem was good, especially since it was extremely odd. All blocks readable except for those 8, although the drive knew it was in trouble.

It reminds me of problems others have reported, especially those using high level error checking file systems like ZFS, where the drive accidentally writes to the wrong location correct data correctly, so the internal CRC passes on reads. The firmware in drives is said to be getting to full OS complexity....

> We try to avoid buying enterprise drives at all costs.

Why is that? From what I can read on your website, it seems you would be the correct use-case for enterprise drives, no?x

That assumes that you don't think enterprise drives are just marketing ploy, to get execs to part with more of their money for no real benefit.

We designed our storage pods and software to work in spite of hard drive failures, so paying a $50-$100 premium for a drive just to avoid possibly $5 in labor to replace it when it fails is not a good practice.

We go for the good cheap stuff, and that's how we maintain low prices for our actual product, which is online backup. As long as the drives are reliable-ish, and are inexpensive, that's what counts!

I can understand the cost/reliability tradeoff given a data storage mechanism that provides enough resiliency, but how do you provide that? Are the drives just single-drive FSes with secret sauce atop it, or commodity RAID-N with something doing resiliency atop that, or ?

Any laptop with a mechanical hard drive makes my hair stand on its end. In 2014, it's just an unnecessary liability.

When my girlfriend and I started getting serious a few years back, the first thing I did was to replace her aging MacBook Pro with a SSD MacBook Air. It was the only way the relationship could move forward.

Interesting, I bought my wife a Hitachi and it improved the relationship.

I see what you did there.

If you build good hardware...you build good hardware.

I love love LOVE the SSD drive in my laptop for performance reasons (I can't ever go back, seriously). Emotionally I'm also glad it doesn't have spinning parts anymore, but in the end your laptop can still get stolen or break or fail. No matter what, in 100 percent of all situations, you need a backup. (Yes, I work at Backblaze, but seriously, you don't have to use our product, JUST USE SOMETHING!!)

Yes, I also forced her to get a Dropbox account. That's how she knew the relationship was getting serious.

I helped my in-laws set up a new iMac last fall (an upgrade from their ancient Dell tower running XP) and made sure to install Dropbox. Sure they may never use it, but it's only a matter of time until I need to do some form of tech support, and it's going to make my life immeasurably easier.

In 1999, I knew my new girlfriend was the right one for me when she was excited about one of those fancy "Airports" from Apple. That Christmas I bought her a Palm IIIx.

We've been married for a dozen years.

Just signed up for BB :)

Nice!

That's more or less exactly how my wife (then girlfriend) got this MacBook. Except replace "aging MacBook Pro" with "2004-era eMachines tower from Walmart". I gave it to her in 2008, when it was still a fairly decent machine, but that junky eMachine was already junk. I had actually forgotten about that old computer until I actually spotted it in some of the photos I was recovering over the weekend.

And for what it's worth, last Thursday, before all of this happened, I had brought up off-site backups, with Backblaze in mind.

SSDs have a slightly higher failure rate than mechanical drives, and when failed are mostly unrecoverable. Here is a report of massive failure rates (>50%) with OCZ drives: http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html

Right now the safest thing to do is to store at multiple cloud providers, where they have proper measures to manage disk failures.

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