Re: [Discuss] Who makes the most reliable hard drives?
Richard Pieri wrote: Backblaze is near line storage: they fill up disks to capacity, spin them down... I believe they actually have a mix of usage scenarios. No doubt they have some systems that operate as you describe, while others are more like front line storage. If this was not the case, then the way Green drives spin down would be irrelevant. I'd have to look at the original source material that the article was based on to see whether Backblaze segmented their reliability stats based on the type of usage. WD Green disks can be made to work sanely with a simple hdparm command: hdparm -q -S 250 /dev/sdX Right, and I've done that as well. I've even used Green drives in small RAID arrays with no apparent problems. The comment in the article did make me wonder why Backblaze didn't apply this trivial tweak if they were using the drives in a scenario where they were being used continuously. -Tom -- Tom Metro The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting. http://www.theperlshop.com/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Who makes the most reliable hard drives?
On 10/5/2014 10:54 PM, Tom Metro wrote: It sounded like the stats don't include many Western Digital Red (NAS) drives, and no mention is made of Seagate NAS drives. Might they fair better? They also note that the Western Digital Green drives were not good for reliability, being negatively impacted by vibration and their constant power cycling (spinning down to save power). Backblaze is near line storage: they fill up disks to capacity, spin them down, and leave them like that until user requests spin them up. You need to analyze their reports with that in mind because that's not what most of us would call a typical server environment. WD Red disks are intended for front line storage: written and read more or less continuously. Very different kind of environment from Backblaze. WD Green disks can be made to work sanely with a simple hdparm command: hdparm -q -S 250 /dev/sdX This sets the idle power time out to five hours assuming I did the math right. Regardless of the math, the five WD Green disks in my home server don't go idle on me after issuing that command to each at boot time. My experience is that storage density has more to do with reliability than manufacturer. The more densely packed the bits, the greater the chance that it will fail in production within a given span. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
