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Comment by atYevP | Hacker News Reader

We're all on this crazy spinning ball together. Early on Backblaze made the decision to stay out of the hardware business (it sounded lucrative after we developed the v1 storage pod, but everyone was a software person, so we went that route), we like to pay our hardware findings forward. It's a good thing to do!

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I really like this detailed write up. A certain large company in Mountain View suggested years ago that they had collected a great deal of metrics on consumer grade hard disks performing in a data center capacity, but refused to publish the data.

The fact that Backblaze isn't embarrassed to share this with the rest of this gives me the warm fuzzies. Thanks for the hard work!

I recently purchased a new Seagate, and I'm feeling a bit of buyer's remorse. That's not to say this article triggered the feeling completely (though it did push me over the edge). Taking this information and the knowledge that recent model Barracudas appear to have aggressive APM that loads/unloads the heads after a minute or so of inactivity (unless disabled, but it doesn't persist between reboots) AND seems to borrow from laptop-grade design... I think I'd be better off replacing it. Again. ;)

I wonder if the poor longevity of Seagate drives is due to changes in quality control or design? I have older ones that don't utilize the APM load/unload features and are still running fine after many years. Then again, they were also pre-flood drives.

I'd also be curious to know if there's a correlation with where the drive was manufactured and its survival rate, though I suspect that might be a much more difficult metric to collect.

Yes! To my knowledge, this is the first large-scale drive reliability study that names manufacturers.

The study you mentioned by that certain large company was tantalizing, because it also found large differences between manufacturers, but did not name them. The relative insensitivity to temperature (<= 40C or so IIRC) they found was helpful, however.

True. I remember when that study was first posted that it did have curious metrics that were surprising in their own right, but it was disappointing that nothing was correlated by manufacturer. I can understand why that might have been the case. The potential for litigation would have been enormous. ;)

From my perspective (speaking as a consumer), it's more useful to have information about the relative quality of each and their tradeoffs. AFAIK, Seagate produces among the fastest mechanical drives on the market, but it appears you exchange longevity for speed...

> A certain large company in Mountain View suggested years ago that they had collected a great deal of metrics on consumer grade hard disks performing in a data center capacity, but refused to publish the data.

They did in 2007:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

(first result of a search for "google hard drive report")

That report does not have data about individual manufacturers. Perhaps Google considered that to be lawsuit bait, or perhaps they considered it to be proprietary. Either way Backblaze's post has actionable information about which manufacturer to buy with respect to reliability trade-offs. Google's report does not.

Yeah, that's precisely what I intended to convey. I admit my comment didn't specify what I meant by unpublished data, but I appreciate that you inferred exactly what I meant.

Performance and longevity metrics are curious but they're almost useless without naming the manufacturers. To that extent, the data may as well go unpublished from a consumer's perspective on the merit that it--as you said--contains no actionable data. The Backblaze report does, and that's why I find it useful.

>Perhaps Google considered that to be lawsuit bait, or perhaps they considered it to be proprietary.

I don't think it has anything to do with being afraid of lawsuits (or every consumer review company would be out of business) or worried about competition getting that information. They most likely get some kind of volume pricing discount (or even pricing based on experienced reliability) that is dependent on them not releasing such data.

I should've been more specific. I'm aware of the study and have seen it, but to my knowledge they refused to publish data regarding the manufacturers, probably for legal reasons.

It's curious that other replies garnered from my post the implied information that I was relating to a lack of specific/specified manufacturers, and you're the only one who took it completely literal. :)

That's exactly what he's talking about; they didn't publish the data:

Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes significantly when we normalize failure rates per each drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to the proprietary nature of these data.

In AceJohnny2's defense, and after re-reading what I wrote, I can see how it was assumed I was referring to the data set as a whole rather than the exclusion of manufacturer's data. But I'm certainly appreciative that you knew exactly what I meant. ;)

i can only assume that google didnt want to impair any options from the hard disk developers. If there review stated that one disk if far better than other then that might crusify that HD company.

I believe they acted in that concern ( or so i want to believe )

It's hard for a public, respected company to statistically bash the quality of another public, respected brand. It just ain't gonna happen, what with all the lawyers and money and connections.

Glad to have smaller entities which are less prone to being swayed.

That would be interesting. I bet the older drives were probably from Taiwan/Japan, and the newer ones from Thailand/Vietnam.

From what I hear though, at least in Vietnam the plants are run extremely well. Japanese or Japanese trained managers, and interestingly enough most of the workforce are women. they all meet some ISO specification of precision/reliability, I think. Actual conditions, I have no idea, since I"ve never actually been to one (and am not qualified to say)

I may be wrong, but it appears that many of the new model Seagates are Chinese labeled ones. I gather from some previous reading that their manufacturing process is slightly more variable than other locales with quality to match.

Also, you raise a fantastic point about the work conditions. We hear things about Apple's plants and other mobile device manufacturers, but I don't know of any study that includes hard drive makers and the worker conditions at those plants. Very good point.

Well don't despair about your Seagate purchase. We're still buying them. Plus, over 80% of the drives that we have in production are over 4 years old. You should be just fine :)

Just wanna say, there are a bunch of little businesses, like mine, that really depend on writeups like yours when making suggestions to customers. So, thank you.

We just had a spate of bad Seagate drives come through our shop. The drives should be under warranty but Seagate's making it a hassle. Some of them were less than six months old. Your writeup combined with the recent trouble means that we're dropping Seagate for our preferred HD brand.

You're welcome! We love sharing information, and if it can't have a direct impact on our business, there's no good reason not to do it. A rising tide floats all ships! Hopefully you can find a decent substitute for the Seagates you're recommending. And if you need to recommend an online backup service, I can suggest a good one ;-)

We have actually set up a couple of clients with Backblaze. :-) I've been following your guys' progress since early on.

Awesome! That's what we I like to hear :)

It's really annoying to find out that drive went dead in few months and then it happens with the replacement drives too. Especially on laptops with only one drive. Of course backups allow you to restore key data but you'll still have to setup the system. I got series of three Seagate failures and got really tired of it. Of course all non important data wasn't backed up do it was an extra annoyance.

I really appreciate this; as someone who has had a number of SSD and HDD failures due to lackluster manufacturers (OCZ and Seagate respectively).

It would be great if you could list power consumption numbers too next time. For me, that's also a big consideration for something (NAS) that is on 24/7 in the house.

Yev from Backblaze here -> Unfortunately we don't really have any publishable stats on that quite yet, but I can say that we prefer low-power drives so that we can fit more of them in to the racks and not go over power-limits.

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