[HN Gopher] Backblaze Hard Drive Stats
___________________________________________________________________
Backblaze Hard Drive Stats
Author : Labo333
Score : 171 points
Date : 2021-04-05 09:20 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.backblaze.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.backblaze.com)
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Just added a couple of MG07ACA14TA's to my NAS, as one of the two
| 8TB WD Reds I had started to fail after just 3 years of on time.
|
| They're massive beasts, with 9 platters and 18 heads, but
| enabling acoustics and power saving really helped on the seeking
| noise level.
|
| Not sure how much of a performance hit that leads to though,
| haven't had time to fully investigate.
|
| They run significantly cooler than the 8TB Reds tho, from ~45C
| down to ~30C in the same bays.
| bscphil wrote:
| > but enabling acoustics and power saving really helped on the
| seeking noise level.
|
| Do you know what's the approximate power draw (in Watts) of
| each drive with these settings enabled? I'd like to move to a
| lower power system sometime in the next year, but I'll also
| need to add some more drives. Power is extremely expensive
| where I live.
|
| I wonder if the power saving features reduce the drive
| lifetimes (because of quicker spindowns)... might not be a good
| idea for an always on NAS.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| I recently built a NAS that sits 50cm away from me so noise
| was my #1 priority. During my research I realized that there
| are really two types of NAS drives:
|
| - the enterprise ones that are meant to sit in a datacenter.
| They offer the best performance but are noisy and power
| hungry.
|
| - the SOHO ones, that are often 5400 rpm. They are lower
| performance but optimized for noise and power consumption.
|
| I ended up with ST6000VN001 and the noise level is very
| reasonable.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Yeah my NAS is also 50cm away from me. After changing the
| acoustics and getting rid of the WD Reds, my NAS is now
| actually more quiet.
|
| And thanks to the better thermals, due to the helium, I can
| reduce fan speeds significantly as well.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > Do you know what's the approximate power draw (in Watts) of
| each drive with these settings enabled?
|
| I do not, but I could find out as I have a external SATA to
| USB adapter with separate 12V power. Check back in a day or
| so.
|
| > I wonder if the power saving features reduce the drive
| lifetimes (because of quicker spindowns)
|
| Ah, I enabled max power-saving _without_ spindown. Most of my
| earlier HD failures, including a couple of WD Greens, taught
| me to avoid spinning down.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| So I just recalled I had a DC-capable clamp meter, and I
| was able to isolate the disk on the last stretch of a power
| connector chain.
|
| I tried running with both the power management set to
| "Level 128 - Minimum power usage without Standby (no
| spindown)" and Acoustics Managment to "Maximum", as well as
| "Disabled" for both. Didn't make a noticeable difference on
| power draw, at most 0.1A more during writes, primarily just
| noise. Idle 5V 0.27A 12V
| 0.40A Write 5V 0.53A 12V
| 0.50A
|
| So that's just over 6W idle and 8.7W under load. I'm
| surprised about the high idle draw, both due to being
| significantly higher than the specs[1] and due to them
| running so cool. Did they spin down the disks to get the 4W
| figure perhaps? I did check my clamp meter against my
| electronic load and it reads pretty accurate.
|
| I didn't manage to test reads properly, since the disks are
| part of a ZFS pool and it spreads the reads all over, along
| with aggressive caching.
|
| [1]: https://toshiba.semicon-
| storage.com/us/storage/product/data-...
| bscphil wrote:
| Thanks for testing! That does seem kinda high. Western
| Digital has the following figures for 14 TB WD Reds:
| Read/Write - 6.2 W Idle - 3.0 W Standby
| and sleep - 0.8 W
|
| Which strikes me as pretty reasonable. I suppose I'll
| stick with those since I can rip them out of EasyStores.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Toshiba datasheet says 8.1W under Q1 4k random R/W, I did
| my testing with streaming writes and queue depth around
| 10, so my write figure seems reasonable.
|
| For idle the datasheet says 4.53W typical, however I
| admit my disks were idle only for a few minutes when I
| did my readings as dinner was almost ready, so possible
| they would go lower after longer idle periods.
| nahtnam wrote:
| How do you lower the acoustics and enable power saving? I have
| WD Reds and they are super loud and annoying
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I use TrueNAS, it has it as part of the disk settings.
|
| For Linux it seems hdparm[1] is the way to go.
|
| [1]: https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-reduce-hard-drive-s-
| acoustic-...
| purplecats wrote:
| 3 years seems like a very short shelf life for a HD. You seem
| reasonably happy with it. Was it expected?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I'm not terribly happy with the 8TB Red model, given it only
| lasted 3 years. It's also been fairly noisy and running hot.
|
| I have eight 3TB Reds, so far I've had two of those
| developing pending sectors after over 6 years of power-on
| time (no spindown), and of those one developed uncorrectable
| sectors a year later and I replaced it. The other one is
| chugging along happily so far with 27 pending sectors.
|
| In the case of the WD Red, it went from pending sectors to
| failing SMART self tests in less than two weeks.
|
| So yeah, disappointed about the short life span.
| andrewzah wrote:
| After https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26536019 I pulled off
| all my files from backblaze. Is there a good alternative for long
| term storage other than amazon glacier? For about ~6tb-8tb of
| data.
| alberth wrote:
| Isn't this a bit hasty. Backblaze fixed thr issue immediately,
| wrote a detailed blog posted and it was also found to have only
| been in a single webpage of theirs.
|
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-party-tr...
|
| Now while I certainly agree that I don't like this info leaked,
| there was no mal-intent and they quickly took action once
| notified. I feel like their action is what makes me like them
| so much.
| dannyw wrote:
| Yes and no. This issue was perhaps X lines of code away from
| accidentally transferring the contents of your files (or
| login email and password!) to Facebook, or a malicious
| attacker.
|
| For one, this highlights they don't have automated tests
| detecting arbitrary/malicious JS injection on their web app.
| This is a serious security risk: we are talking about your
| cloud filesystem here, and "spear phish / bribe your
| marketing intern to adding malicious.js" is a real attack
| vector.
|
| Alarms should be going off internally whenever a new external
| JS file gets included in your webapp, either ststically or
| dynamically. Facebook pixel today, a malicious hacker
| tomorrow.
|
| I'd expect a private cloud to have better security procedures
| than "wait till someone on Twitter discovers a bug".
|
| (Personally, I will continue to use Backblaze, but just
| highlighting why it's a serious security concern.)
| brightball wrote:
| Out of curiosity, do you have a recommendation of a tool /
| structure for an automated test to catch that type of
| injection? This is something I haven't considered in my own
| pipeline that I'd like to address.
| kilburn wrote:
| For external files in particular you can use Content
| Security Policies [1] in the server configuration.
|
| Injecting third-party content then requires editing both
| your site and the server setup. Of course, you can make
| the policies more or less strict depending on how much
| you want to tighten this kind of attack vector.
|
| [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP
| peteretep wrote:
| > This issue was perhaps X lines of code away from
|
| This is a weird metric.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's really bad, and might as well be X lines of code
| away from Bacon
| spzb wrote:
| Yep. Logically any piece of code is X lines away from any
| other for sufficiently large values of X.
| jscheel wrote:
| You should not be backing up plaintext passwords to offsite
| storage _anywhere_. Or do you mean malicious JS capturing
| your form entry at login?
| dannyw wrote:
| That's what I mean.
|
| But the specific issue I see is that a piece of external
| JS got inserted into their web app, and their security
| team didn't realise it.
|
| The fact that its from GTM is no excuse: give me Google
| tag manager, I'll exfil your users data in an hour ;)
| jscheel wrote:
| Ahh, fair enough. They definitely snippets to be vetted
| by their security team. I'm sure they've learned from
| this mistake though, and I'm not sure I would trust
| anyone else any more than them.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| It would be far better if they described how they managed
| to let Google Tag Manager be included for so long, and
| how they've changed their deployment process to avoid
| third-party scripts from being included in the future.
| [deleted]
| robin_reala wrote:
| They haven't yet explained the series of events that lead to
| GTM being included on non-marketing pages. That's the main
| worry.
| jscheel wrote:
| I too have been really shocked at how nasty our community has
| been regarding this issue.
| ksec wrote:
| Yes, 500+ Comments [1], you can quite literally put it out
| as HN hate Backblaze. Part of the Cancel Culture where they
| expect everyone is saint and can do no wrong.
|
| I mean, worst of all, many of them are Web Developer means
| there is a very high probability they have make mistakes
| /bugs in the pass, big or small. Which put them in the
| category of hypocrite.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26536019
| andrewzah wrote:
| I don't think sending info about filenames and sizes is
| acceptable, ever. It's a shame as backblaze has been a
| solid backup choice for a while.
|
| edit: and enabling facebook tracking on customer pages...
| dewey wrote:
| That was not a deliberate action though, that's just the
| default behavior of the analytics snippet that someone
| included on the page. If there's humans involved there
| will always be bugs, the question is how well you deal
| with them and react. I think they did a good job once it
| was pointed out.
| stanmancan wrote:
| Everyone gets mad when there's a breach or a bug that
| doesn't get full disclosure.
|
| When a company provides full disclosure people are shocked
| and abandon the platform.
|
| Every company has bugs. Everyone eventually gets breached.
| If a company is honest with what happened, follows up with
| their users, and fixes it, what more can you ask for?
|
| Should it have happened? No. Did they find the issue? Yes.
| Did they fix it? Yes. Did they disclose it? Yes. Perfect,
| thanks.
| tertius wrote:
| Because corporation didn't deliver on promises. Trust was
| broken and their attempts at fixing said trust is
| meaningless given what they've already done to break said
| trust.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| There's a difference in character between a "sorry we
| messed up, we fixed it" mistake and a "sorry we got
| caught, we fixed it" mistake. A pattern of the former
| often suggests the latter, but as far as I know Backblaze
| has no pattern of these.
| anamexis wrote:
| Why is their attempts at fixing trust meaningless?
| poidos wrote:
| maybe rsync.net? I don't use them (yet) but they seem cool.
| andrewzah wrote:
| I looked at rsync.net, but they are 2.5 cents/gb versus
| backblaze's $0.005/gb or glacier's $0.004/gb per month. I see
| rsync.net for active use, while b2/glacier are for set-and-
| forget backups.
| yosito wrote:
| Tardigrade.io
| notyourday wrote:
| Why would you use any cloud storage company without encrypting
| your files?
|
| I use Backblaze and Wasabi.
| [deleted]
| purplecats wrote:
| I just spent the last 12 hours migrating everything to B2. BB
| seems to be somewhat immature relative to the competitors, and
| the product certainly feels that way, but as long as they try
| and the data integrity is there, then I think I am okay with
| it.
|
| The rest of my stuff is in S3 with Glacier auto archives.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Considering that Backblaze was totally open and correcte this
| mistake immediately, what you are asking for is a backup
| company that never makes mistakes. They dont exist. Buy a
| synology NAS. Slap some ironwolfs in it and do your own
| backups.
| dylan604 wrote:
| How many years at $60/year of Backblaze service will it take
| to equal that NAS setup? Also, will that NAS survive a
| disaster? These are the types of questions that make the
| Backblaze services so hard to walk away.
| amelius wrote:
| I wonder, isn't tape backup ripe for disruption? The drives are
| crazy expensive, while tapes are very affordable.
| mcdevilkiller wrote:
| Tape is also incredibly slow and difficult to scale. Also,
| the equipment needed to operate a cluster of tape archivers
| costs a lot, while they are using their own designs dor
| servers, with coXmmodity hardware in them.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Tape is slow only when you need frequently to read some
| random part of it, because you might need a couple of
| minutes to go till the other end of the tape.
|
| The reading/writing speed of tapes is excellent, better
| than that of hard drives, so writing a backup takes less
| time.
|
| For archives that are accessed only infrequently, tape is
| more reliable and also faster.
|
| If you want to have access in less than a minute to any
| part of your backups, then yes, tape is inappropriate and
| you must use HDDs.
| cm2187 wrote:
| And to backup a NAS, it requires to regularly change the
| tapes. Any backup that requires manual steps is likely to
| be delayed and to be too infrequent to be useful.
| amelius wrote:
| > Tape is also incredibly slow and difficult to scale
|
| Tape is still the best backup medium for many small and
| large companies.
|
| And by the way, how fast do you think a service like
| Backblaze is?
| ideaoverload wrote:
| Google archive option looks pretty good with 1.2$/TB/month and
| real time API:
|
| https://cloud.google.com/storage/archival
| risyachka wrote:
| If you are concerned about tracking this should be your last
| choice.
| red0point wrote:
| Yes, until you actually want to download your data and pay 85
| USD for downloading it once.
| charrondev wrote:
| We're so pissed at Google Tag Manager being included in a
| page of a website in error, that we'll move our backups to a
| google service (that with certainty will track analytics at
| google indefinitely).
| woliveirajr wrote:
| OVH, Wasabi.
| aikinai wrote:
| I'm using Arq Backup with Wasabi for the storage. I think it's
| a great combo.
| icedchai wrote:
| I use Wasabi with restic. Wasabi has an S3 compatible API, I
| believe.
| tsujp wrote:
| Hetzner has storage boxes and storage services. Not as cheap as
| Glacier of course. Otherwise there is Acronis, IDrive (nothing
| to do with Apple), and Carbonite. I've never dealt with the
| latter three only heard of them.
| foepys wrote:
| If you need the data, it could very well be cheaper. AWS
| Glacier request costs are no joke.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Well, the idea with Backblaze/Glacier is cheap long term
| storage in exchange for high request costs, no?
|
| For me anyways, this is a tertiary backup of data that is
| duplicated in a zfs raid 10 pool and in external drives at
| a different house. A high request cost isn't much to get
| back my family photos, documents, etc, in a situation where
| neither of the first two backups are available.
| pnutjam wrote:
| Time4vps had the best storage server prices last I checked.
| I've been using them for afew years.
| exhilaration wrote:
| Did Backblaze ever issue an explanation for that?
| shakna wrote:
| The official response from Backblaze is here [0].
|
| > We use Google Tag Manager to help deploy key third-party
| code in a streamlined fashion. The Google Tag Manager
| implementation includes a Facebook trigger. On March 8, 2021
| at 12:39 p.m. Pacific time, a new Facebook campaign was
| created that started firing a Facebook advertising pixel,
| intended to only run on marketing web pages. However, it was
| inadvertently configured to run on signed-in pages.
|
| [0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-
| party-tr...
| brightball wrote:
| I can see how that can happen. The moment that GTM was
| pushed for at my last company it made me really
| uncomfortable but ultimately got pushed through. I wish it
| had a built in process for review and approval.
|
| It looks like it does but the permissions are so
| frustrating to use that it just becomes overly permissive
| as a side effect.
| kbaker wrote:
| Write up here. Accidentally added the Facebook pixel to all
| pages instead of the marketing pages.
|
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-party-
| tr...
| ethbr0 wrote:
| If you want to nail a company to the cross for being in bed
| with Facebook... Backblaze probably shouldn't be at the top
| of your naughty list.
|
| IMHO, over-ado about a small something.
|
| _" A new campaign was launched beginning on March 8, 2021
| on the marketing web pages using Google Tag Manager which
| included the Facebook pixel. That new campaign resulted in
| the Facebook advertising pixel being accidentally
| configured in Google Tag Manager to run on all platform
| pages instead of just the marketing web pages."_
|
| _" We've confirmed that there was only a single page
| (b2_browse_files2.htm) where the Facebook advertising pixel
| had the ability to access certain metadata. We tested this
| on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Our investigation
| determined that 9,245 users visited that page during the
| window when the Facebook campaign was active (March 8 at
| 12:39 p.m. Pacific time, through March 21st at 11:19 p.m.
| Pacific time when we removed the offending code)."_
|
| _" If users were browsing their B2 Cloud Storage files on
| b2_browse_files2.htm during that period, AND clicked to
| preview file information, then the Facebook pixel pulled
| the following metadata: folder/file name, folder/file size,
| and the date the folder/file was uploaded. The folder/file
| metadata was limited to file information that was currently
| loaded in the browser.
|
| No actual files or file contents were shared at any time.
| The data that was pulled did not include any user account
| information."_
| AnonC wrote:
| In previous threads about this leak, commenters gave
| examples of how exposing filenames could be harmful to
| certain classes of paying customers. It is not a small
| thing by any stretch of imagination.
| philjohn wrote:
| Then those users probably shouldn't be using something
| with servers in the US that can be accessed with a court
| order. They should backup to an offsite store they have
| full control over.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| To me, 13 days of inadvertent use, followed by immediate
| removal, is a small thing. Your imagination may stretch
| differently.
| [deleted]
| wnevets wrote:
| Tim Apple could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot
| someone but HN would still use their products. Backblaze
| accidentally deploys a facebook pixel to its pages and HN cast
| it off to the tech shadow realm.
| fX0rObfoMN4 wrote:
| You could use rsync.net or tarsnap but it wouldn't be cheap.
| varispeed wrote:
| I initially wanted to pull all my data, but then realised that
| I in fact encrypt everything locally so what they see is just
| garbage, so in my case if the provider is unsafe and leaks all
| my data, that would be of no use to anyone.
| devwastaken wrote:
| That's a good example of the paraphrased quote "don't make
| software for privacy people, they'll never be happy". They
| fixed it, yet every other service is doing far worse behavior.
| Dont hold backblaze on a higher pedestal than amazon unless you
| only want amazon to exist.
|
| Backblaze is the most affordable and available remote
| storage/cdn service available, by _miles_. Go look at a
| calculator between amazon and backblaze.
|
| The actually give half a care and even partner with various
| providers so your outgoing bandwidth is free to them.
| andrewzah wrote:
| What bothers me is using facebook tracking scripts in the
| first page, particularly for internal customer pages. Of
| course I'm not happy with them working with facebook at all.
|
| Other services doing worse things is not an excuse. I don't
| want to go with amazon either, hence my question here.
| risyachka wrote:
| Vast majority of websites integrate facebook or google or
| both their SDKs.
|
| But they don't work with them. They have to it in order to
| run ads and as result to survive.
| tzs wrote:
| For a large number of Windows and Mac users who have less
| than 1 TB to backup (or less than 6 TB if they are willing to
| put up with a fair amount of hassle) there is a far less
| expensive option.
|
| I speak of Windows and Mac users who got a Microsoft 365
| subscription for the Microsoft Office apps. That comes with 1
| TB of OneDrive, or 6 TB if you get the family subscription.
|
| OneDrive has API access which is supported by a fair number
| of commercial and open source backup programs.
|
| You can get a family subscription without being a family. All
| you actually need is the ability to control 5 extra email
| addresses, one for each fake family member. Your 6 TB would
| end up partitioned into 6 1 TB buckets so as I said, would be
| somewhat of a hassle to use.
|
| But if you only need 1 TB, and want or need Office anyway,
| and don't really have a lot of non-backup cloud needs, then
| OneDrive is a good, often overlooked option.
| emit_time wrote:
| Oh hey! It's our favorite time of the quarter!
|
| :D
| wdb wrote:
| I am avoiding Blackblaze as they don't allow you to do due
| diligence. Any requests to get security audit reports, pentest
| reports under NDA are all ignored. If anyone know if they are
| available through their website I am looking forward hearing it.
| [deleted]
| risyachka wrote:
| Wouldn't client side data encrypting solve your concerns?
| notyourday wrote:
| > I am avoiding Blackblaze as they don't allow you to do due
| diligence. Any requests to get security audit reports, pentest
| reports under NDA are all ignored.
|
| What they should do is make you cut a half a million dollar
| check, refundable when you spend half a million dollars on
| services.
|
| It removes so many headaches from dealing with people who think
| their $100 over a year is Very Big Money.
| wdb wrote:
| I don't understand why it matters if I only spend $100 or
| half million? If I am going to use third party I want to
| verify it meets my own security requirements. I think that's
| totally reasonable to ask.
|
| Actually I would expect that such a big company have these
| things readily available on request.
| notyourday wrote:
| Because in the vast majority of the cases those that want
| these docs after getting a generic one start asking
| questions/want interaction while having the attitude that
| "Why should it matter if I only spend $100?" thus expending
| way more company resources than their account is worth.
| Forbo wrote:
| I can't tell you how many times I've been able to
| implement solutions for my organization based off of
| experience with personal projects. If I'm satisfied in my
| due diligence of the provider then I'm a lot more likely
| to turn around and suggest it for use in my corporate
| environment.
|
| In this case it's not so much about a $100 spend, it's
| about them potentially leaving a lot of money on the
| table if they are incapable of delivering the reports in
| question.
| notyourday wrote:
| The money is in the head, not in the long tail. It is
| possible to make money off the long tail by never
| treating anything other than the head as a potential
| head. You will miss some middle of the distribution
| customers, sure, but you won't spend resources of
| hundreds if not thousands "influencers" that don't
| actually influence anyone.
|
| Based on what I have experienced, those that have real
| decision making power in companies that will make a high
| six to seven figure purchases simply do not have time to
| vet their home projects where they are going to spending
| $100/year. The grandstanding arguments about importance
| of their projects come from people who probably won't
| even spend $100/year
| wdb wrote:
| Of course, I wouldn't ask this for a home project but if
| its considered for a business archival solution were
| government regulation requires me to store things for
| multiple years and client data for same period. Of
| course, I will make sure this data is safe. I am not
| going to depend on their marketing pages.
|
| You make it sounds this is ridiculous to do a security
| assessment or to ask for such paperwork. I can tell you
| that my company insurance even demands it. At the moment
| I prefer to pay 3x more and store things at a cloud
| provider which shares these kind of documentation.
| wdb wrote:
| You make it sound like reviewing these documents is free.
|
| If a company ask me for similar paperwork (which they
| have) I have the paperwork in order and ready, they sign
| a NDA and I am sending them. It's just a step in the
| sales process imho
| [deleted]
| Trixter wrote:
| Yes, but you were likely paid more than $100 for your
| time to prepare said documents and have them ready.
| wdb wrote:
| Trixter, yes, I have it ready because I did all these
| audits already as part of company security policy; and
| not because of customers and I can share them on request.
|
| A company that never did a pen test or security audit or
| doesn't want to share them doesn't give me much trust to
| use them as a partner.
| brianzelip wrote:
| Off topic but related - a great podcast episode with the author
| of Restic, an open source backup system (that can connect to
| online services like Backblaze).
|
| https://changelog.com/podcast/434
| cyberlab wrote:
| I always wondered: what happens to customer data when these
| drives fail? I would imagine they would be using fault tolerant
| systems like RAID of ZFS to mitigate. I admire their transparency
| in the usual style of: 'We're a backup company, look how many
| drives we have failing!'
| mcdevilkiller wrote:
| You can read on their blog. They use custom software with Reed-
| Solomon* erasure coding, similar to RAID but distributed
| between different disks, servers and racks. Their EC library is
| on Github (Java). The most enjoyable posts are the ones
| describing how they built their pods and architecture.
| gsruff wrote:
| Their systems are fault tolerant... I found more information on
| their storage architecture here:
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...
|
| [edited to sound less snarky]
| m4rtink wrote:
| I guess the could encrypt the data that ends up on the platters
| so that it would look like random noise to any attacker
| recovering the platters from a broken drive that was not
| physically destroyed?
|
| Of course that has both performance and data corruption
| scenarios that one needs to take into account.
| purplecats wrote:
| .
| garaetjjte wrote:
| They do use erasure coding:
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > BB doesn't have redundancy, right?
|
| No, they do have redundancy.
| terafo wrote:
| What happened in Q1 2020? Almost 2x drop in failure rates is
| quite substantial.
| robk wrote:
| I don't see 2021 yet
| atYevP wrote:
| Yev from Backblaze here -> stay tuned!
| bscphil wrote:
| Yep, this is a repost. @dang this needs (2020)
|
| Edit: arguably the blog post was put up in 2021, but something
| to indicate that it's old news would be useful.
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-fo...
| andrewmunsell wrote:
| I have some ~50 TB total in a NAS, all WD drives. I bought some 3
| & 4 TB WD Red drives around 2014, and they have all been going
| 24/7 with absolutely no problems at all.
|
| I recently needed to expand (to the point I am at now) and bought
| & shucked 14 TB WDs, so I'm curious to see whether there will be
| any long term difference in terms of reliability between the
| "official" red drives and the shucked whitelabel drives.
| fletchowns wrote:
| > I bought some 3 & 4 TB WD Red drives around 2014, and they
| have all been going 24/7 with absolutely no problems at all.
|
| It may seem like they are running fine, but are they actually?
| Have you run a zpool scrub or equivalent?
|
| What happens with these old drives is that one dies and then
| you have to replace it, which is very hard on the other drives
| as the array is rebuilt. Then while the array is being rebuilt,
| another drive dies. It's better to replace drives when they are
| EOL (usually 4 years if running 24/7) rather than waiting until
| there is a problem.
| andrewmunsell wrote:
| It's running in unRAID and I've seen no healthcheck/SMART
| issues, and the monthly parity checks have been 100% fine
| too.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| Shucked drives are very often SMR so caveat emptor.
| MrFoof wrote:
| SMR is very dependent on capacity and SKUs.
|
| The vast majority of SMR hard disks are 6TB capacities and
| below, and I'm only aware on one 8TB Seagate SKU that is SMR.
| Though I'm aware HGST shipped a 20TB SMR drive late in 2020.
|
| NAS Compares has a fairly good starting list of drives and
| whether or not they are CMR or SMR, though there may be more
| exhaustive lists out there:
| https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-
| hard-d...
|
| -- -----
|
| In general, check the R/N of shucked white-label drives, and
| you should be able to quickly find a corresponding datasheet
| (hundreds of pages) from the manufacturer.
|
| For example, some 16TB WD Elements I'm in the process of
| testing after shucking are R/N US7SAR160, which are 16TB HGST
| Ultrastar DC HC550. These are SATA 6Gbps 7200rpm helium-
| filled CMR drives with 512MB of cache.
| andrewmunsell wrote:
| I did verify the ones I bought are not SMR, that was a
| requirement before I bought them in the first place.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| SMR = shingled magnetic recording; comparison to
| conventional/perpendicular magnetic recording:
| https://www.synology.com/en-
| global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutoria...
| neogodless wrote:
| I've seen Backblaze Hard Drive Stat articles in the past, and
| they were a lot longer and had a lot of tables breaking things
| down by manufacturer. This has one chart and a lot of links, but
| the newest one is from January. So what is being shared here
| that's new?
| [deleted]
| fivesixzero wrote:
| This looks like a shift away from their old "editorialized"
| blog-style updates to a data-sharing-centric approach. I'm
| guessing that this takes less time for them and it allows
| various commentators and communities to create their own
| opinions based on the data.
|
| I liked the tone and approach of their old blog posts but this
| is pretty cool too. It's just good to see them continuing to
| share their data since it's arguably relevant to a wide range
| of audiences.
| rincebrain wrote:
| This doesn't appear to be a shift, to me?
|
| It's just the central landing page that Backblaze has had all
| of their HDD stats and blogposts linked from for years
| now[1].
|
| [1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20190707132216/https://www.
| backb...
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