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Are you claiming:

  o Enterprise and Consumer Drives are the Same Hardware.
  o Enterprise Firmware causes the drive to fail fast on physical errors 
    rather than endlessly retrying.
  o Enterprise Drives are more likely to be RMA'd?

Do you have any citations, evidence, reports, articles, white papers, research - anything (beyond random anecdotes, or miscellaneous blog entries) to back up these claims?

>Enterprise Firmware causes the drive to fail fast on physical errors rather than endlessly retrying. TLER

http://features.techworld.com/storage/1019/what-is-time-limi...

TLER is exactly what you want in a RAID. You have another copy of the data in question on the array, why fight for it on a disk when the data may be corrupt anyway.

Fair enough - that's a good article, though it explicitly calls out "RE" drives - "RAID Edition" - which I can imagine having particularly properties associated with "RAID" behavior.

What I'm interesting in hearing, (honestly - I not doubting right now, just interested in being educated) - is if anyone authoritative has described "Enterprise" drives as having these behaviors.

Do you have any data to back up any of these claims?

Because now I have a problem: should I believe guys who have been running 38 petabytes of storage for several years now and regularly present the data they gathered, or should I believe you?

I've read his blog posts before. He's a good author. I don't believe anything factual/technical in my post disagrees with reality or any of his historical posts.

I am open to the idea I'm misinterpreting how he presents enterprise vs consumer firmware loads. I assume its open knowledge that their secret sauce is using consumer hardware so assumptions about 15K fibre channel isn't relevant.

> Do you have any data to back up any of these claims?

Can you respond to this directly, please?

Enterprise firmware, when it has a soft fail, just croaks as fast as possible. That lets the raid array hurry up and do its thing, or maybe even higher level replication do its thing.

Except that also only works "most of the time".

Anyone who works at scale with drives and (RAID-)Controllers knows that even "enterprise" drives can and do take entire controllers down.

It's not uncommon to lose a full set of daisy chained JBODs to a single disk acting funny.

Consequently, and since storage clusters have to be redundant at the node-level anyway, it makes a lot of sense to skip the markup for enterprise firmwares and instead design for quick node failure detection and ejection (short timeouts).

Seriously, no. Wrong in almost every way.

Disclaimer: HGST employee.

I'll leave this non-HGST (Intel) link (PDF) for reference:

http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/ent...

unlike consumer drives which statistically are never replaced under guarantee

They're never replaced because regular consumers statistically don't ask for replacement and simply eat the loss?

Yes. I have an old 250 GB sitting on my desk at home. Waste the time arguing on the phone and getting a RMA and package it up and drive out to ship it back to get a "new" 250G drive (uh ... thanks?), or order a new 2TB, about the same cost. And this is only with technologically inclined consumers, most are just going to return the whole computer or get a new computer.

At a business that is probably some MBA metric and has been budgeted for and is salaried anyway, and you need to prove I'm not just taking drives home to put in my basement server, so they have to be destroyed or sent back, and there may or may not be PCI / CPNI type concerns, so yeah, they get sent back.

With a shorter guarantee, consumer drives have less time in which to fail and be replaced without charge.

i am a statistical anomaly, then, as someone who tracks warranty expirations in a spreadsheet and always makes sure to wipe & sell old drives before they go out of warranty. in the 20 years i've owned hard drives, i've always had failed drives replaced!

drives with longer warranties generally cost more in the consumer segment, and data like this could help people identify the "sweet spot" balancing cost with risk of failure, warranty length, and depreciation curves for storage. my "ancedata" suggests somewhere between 2 and 3 year warranties seems about right for consumer drives these days...

In twenty years, how many hard drives have you had, and how many failed? I've had eight or ten (counting home and work) and just one failed. I had one I used daily for over a decade.

"They're never replaced because regular consumers statistically don't ask for replacement and simply eat the loss?"

There is another paradox as well. Some people won't ask for replacement because assuming you have to send in the bricked drive there is the chance that someone might get at your data somehow.

What about that? (It's why I would never send in a drive that has failed.) [1]

[1] My assumption is that I would have to send in the bad drive (and there is no way to reformat or for me to easily destroy what might be on there). Anyone have experience with what happens here?

I encrypt my drives anyway. If they can reanimate the drive and crack the encryption, well, they deserve to see the data.

Question (not a statement). Doesn't encrypting the drive also prevent you from recovering some of the information on the disk by way of drive recovery utilities?

So for example you might want to encrypt something super sensitive (which I do) but decide to not encrypt something less sensitive (say photos or perhaps a wiki with notes or letters to your grandma or wife or sig other).

Point being that if the drive isn't encrypted you might be able to get at some of that data. (If you need to). If you've encrypted the drive then can you still do that?

Yes, the data will probably be completely irrecoverable from an encrypted drive. However, instead of hoping that you will be able to recover data from a broken drive, back it up.

I strongly recommend Tarsnap[1] for that. All your data is encrypted before it leaves your machine, it is run by our very own 'cperciva, and the key used for encryption (which you need to store securely somewhere, like your parents' house or a bank) can even be printed so hard to destroy accidentally.

The key itself can be encrypted, too. You can use the same password you use to encrypt the drive and now you safely and securely store all your data in such a way that only you can ever access it by remembering a single, longer phrase.

(Although to be fair, another backup would probably be a good idea if the data is really important. Maybe another encrypted hard drive kept at work.)

[1] https://www.tarsnap.com/

I think that looks good but I have to tell you that the idea of committing data to what appears to be one person who could get "hit by a bus" worries me.

I'd like to see on sites like that some kind of continuity plan.

Unless you are suggestion that this is just another "redundant array of backups that you have to assume can fail".

But even in that case it would be a good idea if cperciva had something posted on the site which showed there was someone else who had access and kept on top of the system.

http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg00849.html

I'm not sure who the audience is, but thank you for your explanation of the differences between consumer and enterprise drive firmwares. That runs counter to my naive assumptions, which was that "enterprise" targeted things tend to be of higher reliability and quality than the consumer-targeted alternatives.

I imagine someone in the drive / enterprise storage business would know better, but many of us might not have known that.

"tend to be of higher reliability and quality"

Oh I should preface my remarks with "in family, same technology level" etc.

I'm talking about the same package with the same storage where different firmwares are loaded. Thats the business model the OP is in, he makes posts about stripping consumer drives out of external cases and I don't want to speak for him but he radiates the impression of their whole secret sauce being reliability at the system level not the hardware level.

It is true in my experience that "exotic hardware" marketed as enterprise grade is different physical hardware and is going to be a different level of reliability than consumer hardware.

So the difference between an office NAS SATA 1 TB enterprise and consumer grade is a firmware load, and I think thats what the article is talking about. There is a big difference between a 15K SAS enterprise server drive and a 7200 SATA consumer drive at the hardware level, but that's not the article author's "thing".

They do have WD Red drives in the comparison which aren't enterprise drives, but they also have the fail fast feature, I believe it is called TLER.