Internally we debate a lot whether this PRESERVES the drives or HURTS THEM, we honestly don't know. The one thing we do differently than consumers is we leave the drive "powered up" for 5 years continuously. (Well, we actually walk the drives from time to time recalculating all the checksums to make sure there is no bit-rot to repair from parity.) Our backup service you basically write the data ONCE, then leave it alone for years, and possibly read it back once to do a restore. We also don't run drive intensive applications. When we open a storage pod after 3 years, it is absolutely dust free inside! Our datacenters have filtered air and no carpets, and we walk across sticky fly paper mats as we enter. When I open my home gaming box, it is filled with dust bunnies. I think it's funny people think we (Backblaze) abuse the consumer drives. > if a consumer-grade drive can survive in non-ideal situations then it will be an excellent choice for normal (consumer) conditions. But honestly, if there is a 1% drive failure rate per year or a 10% drive failure rate in a year, you should still backup the data so you can sleep at night. With that said, if an individual purchases ONE DRIVE they might value a lower drive failure rate differently than Backblaze does. Honestly, we're not brand loyal AT ALL, and we're not afraid of a higher failure rate (other than that raises the cost because we have to buy replacements for failed drives). So for us, we have a (pretty simple) little spreadsheet that takes into account drive failure rate as a cost, along with drive density (more dense drives means renting less data center space) and we let the spreadsheet kick out which drives to buy based on the cheapest total cost of ownership. We Reed-Solomon encode each file across multiple drives in multiple machines, and we always use "enough parity" that the failure rate won't result in data loss. when you look at the bigger picture, absolute reliability is less importantĮxactly. > I used to wonder why Backblaze relied so heavily on Seagate. I mean, it used to require a house fire to lose your family photos, but now you can drop your phone in a sink and lose every photo you ever took of your children. Combine that pretty much every single last family photo on earth has become digital just in the last 10 years. :-) I would have hoped that with all the great services like Google Photos and Apple iCloud backups and everything else available that consumers wouldn't be losing data, but we continue to hear horror stories every day about data loss from people. I've spent 12 years in the "backup business", and I agree. ![]() > I do think for the average consumer or the more neglectful business, that we will see far more issues related to data corruption and loss during the transition from hard disks to SSDs. But for now, we retire old equipment for cost reasons before it fails, so all the drives have enough longevity for us. Now, if hard drives stop increasing in density, or take 8 years to increase by a factor of three, then we will need to re-evaluate based on failure rates and the like. Basically any drive takes the same amount of electricity (and physical rental space) as any other drive, so when we can "shrink" the footprint to 1/3 the former footprint, we save 2/3 on space rental and 2/3 on the electricity so it is worth doing. ![]() The rough rule of thumb is that it is worth us moving to more dense drives when we can get than factor of three density increase. Right now as we speak we are planning on moving data off of 4 TByte drives to 12 TByte drives. I definitely don't think these issues will affect Backblazeįor pure cost reasons, we (Backblaze) tend to migrate off of the smaller drives after about 5 years anyway.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |