
Dispelling Backblaze's HDD Reliability Myth - Freaky
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6028/dispelling-backblaze-s-hdd-reliability-myth-the-real-story-covered/index.html
======
pcurve
I read the article with great anticipation, but the author fails to poke any
more holes in Backblaze's test that they themselves haven't already caveated.

Backblaze already acknowledged that their usage environment doesn't reflect
that of normal consumer, yet the author harps on the point.

The author tries to debunk Backblaze's claim that it found no correlation
between drive temperature and failure rate. Yet he presents no evidence that
Backblaze's methodolgy was wrong.

Backblaze had large enough sample to have even distribution of drives in
various temperature, rack, and load environment. I doubt they put all Seagate
drives in the middle shelf of Ver. 1 racks where it was the hottest, but put
all Hitachi drives in the bottom of the Ver. 3 racks where it was cooler and
more stable.

Unless there is another study that shows failure rate of these drives in
normal consumer environment, Seagate's 3-5x failure rate should give people a
pause.

~~~
wiredfool
I find it particularly galling that "Everybody knows temperature is important"
is the rebuttal to a bunch of data saying "we didn't see an effect".

If you've got data, post it. If not, it starts to sound like astroturf.

Fwiw, with my small sample size, I agree with backblaze. Seagates appear to be
failing more, and avoid wdc greens.

~~~
zzzcpan

      > and avoid wdc greens
    

Why? Backblaze reports 3.6% AFR on wdc greens over 4.4 years, which is pretty
good.

~~~
sexmonad
Anecdotally, at my last job, we had used them on several of our internal file
and VM servers (because they were cheap), and they had a nasty habit of
falling off the bus overnight, causing the RAID controller to go berserk.

------
lytfyre
>"Backblaze claims that drive temperature doesn't affect drive life. That is
counter to the observations of many others, including drive manufacturers."

Google has a whitepaper[0] on a large deployed sample size of drives which
disagree with the author's claims here. I agree that more data from backblaze
would be nice, but their claims do seem to have more plausibility than the
author suggests. (If he has methodology issues with the Google paper, that
would be more interesting)

[0]-
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf)
(pdf warning)

~~~
nwh
There's a typo in that link.

[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf)

I'm more inclined to believe Google's results than anybody elses, the amount
of data they have is staggering and the results they got are fairly clear cut.
I personally don't bother cooling spinning disks, it just seems like a
complete waste of time and effort based on that paper.

------
mnordhoff
"With varying numbers of drives for each model, it is possible that some bad
batches may have made their way into the sample pool, thus further skewing the
numbers."

So, to measure drive reliability, the author recommends that you don't count
unreliable drives, since it may "skew the numbers"?

------
cuhaos
This Tweaktown article offers nothing in the way of factual evidence to
discount any of the hard work Backblaze put into that blog post.

Shame on Tweaktown for poo poo'ing on Backblaze's effort.

------
techsupporter
I'm curious why the author believes that beating the ever loving crap out of
drives in harsh conditions and seeing which ones come out, overall, on top
creates a myth. Perhaps the Backblaze article is better headlined "which hard
drives seem to hold up well under pressure." Consumer environments usually
have crappy, unreliable power (power strip chained to power strip plugged into
an outlet from the 1960s), random vibrations (especially with kids), and poor
air flow conditions (who here has done Family IT and had to carve the dust out
of the case stuck behind a non-moving fan?). The only thing a consumer
environment lacks from Backblaze's comparison is 24/7 read/write operations.

~~~
mnordhoff
I would read an article about how bullet-resistant different models of car
are, but I wouldn't completely change my purchasing decisions, as I avoid
bullets. (Whoa, I didn't even mean to use a car analogy.)

"Consumer environments usually have crappy, unreliable power ..."

I would hope that Backblaze is on reliable, stable, data center power --
though knowing how cost-conscious they are, perhaps not -- so that's one
aspect where they wouldn't be able to provide good information.

~~~
ricardobeat
You got it backwards. You live in Kabul, so the article on bullet resistance
is completely relevant. The point is that Backblaze's deployment conditions
are way more similar to a domestic user's than other enterprise deployments.

~~~
mnordhoff
More similar, yes, but maybe not similar enough. I wonder if it's the
pathological vibration killing the Seagates. If so, you don't want to use
Seagates in a file server sitting on top of your washing machine, but maybe
they're fine for your living room media box.

Edit: Unlike Backblaze, I have no hard numbers, and can only pull suppositions
out of my ass.

------
nkurz
This article is astonishing. I try hard to give the benefit of the doubt to
authors (as opposed to salespeople, speechwriters, and advertisers), and
assume that they have good intentions and believe what they are saying. But I
can't find any explanation for this article other than paid hit-piece or
personal vendetta.

Here's the article's conclusion:

 _The data from Backblaze should not influence a purchasing decision by any
consumer, regardless of what type of drive they are purchasing. The
innumerable variables, and lack of documentation, ensures the results are
unreliable. Even for the winners, the results aren 't good; the failure rates
are exponentially higher than those observed in the real-world. One should
question whether these companies could survive financially with the massive
warranty return rates in real-world scenarios._

And here is some of the logic:

 _It is the release of the data, in handy charts and graphs that encourage
misrepresentation, which brings out the data-storage stickler in me. HDD
manufacturers spend billions of dollars in R &D, and their labs are designed
to characterize and measure the reliability and endurance of their storage
solutions._

This last line converted from to "undecided" to "paid propaganda", as I doubt
that vendettas come with such clearly presented "suggested talking points".
It's worth reading if just to see such a stunning example of the art form.

~~~
fatrachet
A third option other than hit-piece or vendetta would be just page views.

A lot of tech writers and bloggers just write counter pieces to popular
articles in the hope to get read, spread and shared by whoever dislikes or
disagrees with the original article. It's become very common to see articles
like "Why [insert yesterdays top HN post] is wrong/will never work/is
flawed/..." on HN and reddit.

~~~
nkurz
I'm willing to believe that page views are his and his employer's intent, and
I'm willing to believe it would be titled as it is, the level of vitriol in
the content makes me think there must be something more.

------
xlfe
The author of this article (Paul) appears to ignore the law of large numbers -
while Paul's arguments against using the figures from Backblaze as measures of
drive reliability would hold if Backblaze's analysis was based on a small
sample size, because their sample size is relatively large, Paul's criticisms
don't hold. Paul's argument is that any analysis of hard-drive reliability
should control for factors like vibration and temperature as these vary in all
environments - but in fact, because Backblaze has taken large (enough) sample
of drives, these variations are already controlled for (ie cancelled out).
Sure the consumer is probably never going to experience a failure irrespective
of whether the buy a seagate or WD drive - but that's not the point - the
point is that the long tail of the distribution, WD and Fujitsu beat Seagate
for reliability. That is still valuable information for people, even if they
aren't going to be using their drives in the same type of environment as
Backblaze.

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0x0
Warning: Browsing this site on ios mobilesafari will randomly taskswitch into
the app store app, onto the buy page for some ios game.

~~~
MBCook
That has been happening to me more and more recently. It's _amazingly_
obnoxious.

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josephlord
Of course it isn't a large scale scientific experiment with controls in place
for all the variables they are running a business and the data is a by-product
(albeit one which they can use to optimise their own business).

But it is the largest scale testing I'm aware of that publishes the
manufacturer names. For that alone it is valuable. I also like the fact it is
harsher than normal environment, I don't want the most reliable disk if it
never gets touched or used or to have to baby it.

------
TYPE_FASTER
That article was just like reading the Backblaze post, if the Backblaze post
had been split into three pages and covered in ads.

