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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

> 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")

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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 )

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 I admit my comment didn't specify what I meant by unpublished data, but I appreciate that you inferred exactly what I meant.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 To that extent, the data may as well go unpublished from a consumer's perspective on the merit that it--as you said--contains no actionable data.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.

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.

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. :)

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