
A Look at Backblaze’s Toshiba Hard Drives - ehPReth
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/a-look-at-backblazes-toshiba-hard-drives/
======
js2
The first hard drive I used was a 40 MB Seagate, $900 in 1989. It was the size
of a hefty phone book.

The first NetApp Filer I used had 4 GB drives, total capacity a few hundred
GB, don't recall cost (not cheap), in 1997. It was the size of a small closet.

The first EMC I used had drives of size I don't recall, total capacity in the
TB, for unimaginable prices, in 2000. It was the size of small room.

We're up to 8 TB drives. In 3.5". For under $300. It's mind-boggling.

~~~
univacky
I used Fastrand.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_FASTRAND](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_FASTRAND)

~~~
js2
You win. :-)

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bluedino
>> HGST, Seagate and Western Digital drives all have the serial number of the
drive on the top end of the drive. Toshiba drives do not.

Is simply printing and adding a label to each hard drive not enough, is it too
error-prone, or what?

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> The drive manufacturer won't do it for us (at least
not at our scale). We're currently chatting to some channel retailers that
would be able to do it for us and allow us to scale a little bit. It was
discouraging us from buying in larger quantities, but if the price of the
drive + labeling works out, we'll try some larger orders.

~~~
DannyBee
The drives don't get delivered in pods for you, right?

So why is this not just part of the "take all drives from large box/crate/etc"
process for the drives?

IE whoever is taking them out of boxes puts them down, one by one, in a simple
little labeling machine that slaps label on them (and records into a stupid
database the label).

If you want something more advanced, labeling machine has small camera that
takes picture of top of drive for further identification, you can process and
store all the barcoded info that exist in the image (unlike OCR, the barcodes
should be 100% accurate)

~~~
atYevP
We do not get them delivered in pods no, we put them in at the datacenter. We
don't do it because of the time constraints. Lets say it takes 30 seconds to
do one individual drive. With 45 drives in a chassis that's 22 minutes per
pod, and we get a ton of pods and drives delivered at once. Our datacenter
techs are busy enough as it is, so if we can offload them, we try to. Now, if
these drives were inexpensive and had a 0% failure rate over 4 years and the
manufacturer/retail chain supplier still refused to put them on, yea we'd hire
someone to do just labeling and do it ourselves, but for now the math doesn't
work out.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Yev, if you're taking a drive out of the anti-static bag and installing it in
a machine it takes slightly less than 3 seconds to pull an asset tag bar code
off a sheet of printed labels and stick it on the drive. Two scans of the
drive asset tag, serial number on the label, and poof you are done.

A very large consumer of drives at a previous employer :-) did this pretty
efficiently. When we expanded our cluster for Blekko we did this for the 5000
drives we got from Western digital (well the scanning, we didn't really need
an asset tag) and it goes really quickly with a code scanner in hand and a
python script recording the values.

~~~
atYevP
Sure, maybe my math was off, I'm not a datacenter guy, they are very efficient
;-) It comes down to cost/time. We did small-scale tests and they went pretty
well. We're hoping to avoid the manual process on our end, but if we can't get
a distributor to label them and it makes financial sense to buy the Toshiba's,
we'll do it ourselves :)

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jshb
Didn't you brag about taking out HDD out of external drives to use in your DC?
But now you are saying you can't even put a label on a drive?

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> sure we can, but the datacenter guys are very
analytical, they take time in to consideration as theirs is at a premium, so
they could do it in the datacenter, but we'd much rather have them prelabeled.

~~~
rbanffy
This could be automated. A very simple computer with a SATA port and a USB
label printer should be able to neatly print a tag with relevant drive data
for every drive it sees through the SATA port.

At least the human error part would be mitigated. With some clever connector
design, I guess a drive could be labeled in 5 seconds or less. If you do it
for all drives before mounting, you'd get a single standard label for every
unit.

~~~
atYevP
Definitely something to consider if we scale this up. Right now if we were to
propose that to our ops team their heads might explode. Gotta make sure they
are open to new workflows first :*D

~~~
rbanffy
> Right now if we were to propose that to our ops team their heads might
> explode.

Please don't. I wouldn't like to be responsible for such a disaster. Those are
nice folks.

~~~
atYevP
They ARE nice folks. I shall tell them you said so. They like the positive
reinforcement :)

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lucasjans
Slightly off topic - I love the Backblaze reports. I'm in a situation where I
need some 2.5" drives but I'm having a hard time finding reliable research
information on reliability. Anyone have any tips?

~~~
kijin
Do you need high performance, energy efficiency, or a lot of space?

Performance-wise, I have nothing but good things to say about the WD Black
series and recent 7200rpm drives from HGST (formerly Hitachi, now owned by
WD). Of course neither is any match to a decent SSD, but the 1TB models are
1/10 the price of a similarly sized SSD :)

For energy efficiency, on the other hand, any 5400rpm drive from WD or HGST
will do. They are quiet and reliable.

As for Seagate, I've had at least two of their drives fail on me in the last
few years, not to mention they feel significantly slower than similar drives
from WD and HGST in typical laptop usage. Even a 5400rpm WD Blue can run
circles around a 7200rpm Seagate drive.

<evidence type="anecdotal" />

~~~
Already__Taken
A 1tb HGST 7k drive is £50 A 1tb Samsung 850 EVO is £300

I thought it'd be interesting how your "1/10th the price" sounded ok but was
actually more like 16% - 20% the cost. I'm constantly impressed by how the SSD
prices keep falling.

~~~
kijin
Yeah, the prices seem to have gone down again since the last time I checked :)

------
x0054
I find the problem with lack of serial number on the side of the hard drive to
be a little silly. How hard would it be to get someone in your firm to simply
place labels with serial numbers on the side of the Toshiba drives. It
wouldn't take more then 10-20 minutes with a label maker.

~~~
dspillett
_> It wouldn't take more then 10-20 minutes with a label maker._

That does introduce a human error based point of failure though - a few from a
batch could have their labels mixed up.

Given how blackblaze's setup is described someone powering off the wrong drive
or entire node by mistake due to a misidentified non-failed drive will not
affect service at all, the built-in resilience to hardware failure will easily
cover this, _but_ there will still be some impact if only in the wasted man-
time (for the original error and any resulting investigation & relabelling
effort) and any light performance degradation as the affected node is brought
back into service.

So for the number of drives they use, perhaps the manufacturers labelling the
drives in a consistent manner is valuable enough to complain about not being
the case.

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rasz_pl
Looks like Backblaze finally fixed SSL, took them a little while of whining
and stupid excuses(1), but we are finally there.

1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8999036](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8999036)

~~~
atYevP
USA! USA!

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outworlder
>> Failure: Disk 0491/sdag doesn’t contain a valid partition table >> Pod0491:
>> x Replace sdag (Z252A34AS) with a new 3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300 >> x Reboot
Pod0491 and re-add new sdag to sync

I wish they fed that to a sound synthesizer with a 'Borg' voice. Coolest
datacenter ever.

~~~
clunkclunk
In Mac OS X Terminal:

say -v Trinoids "Failure: Disk 0491/sdag doesn’t contain a valid partition
table. Pod0491: Replace sdag (Z252A34AS) with a new 3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300.
Reboot Pod0491 and re-add new sdag to sync. Your biological and technological
distinctiveness will be added to our own"

~~~
wiredfool
Not sure if I want to tell the kids about that one or not. I may not hear the
end of it. (or at least, the half hour each till parental controls kicks them
out)

~~~
abrowne
It's even more fun if you teach them "sleep" too, so it will start speaking at
unexpected times.

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lylebarrere
I still wish they would clarify the language in their ads. When they say
'everything attached to your computer, all your external and internal drives
completely unlimited for $5/month" they really should clarify they have no way
to back up a NAS device.

~~~
atlbeer
Well, technically a NAS isn't connected to your computer. It's connected to
your network, which your computer is connected to.

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ivraatiems
I just bought one of the 3TB models described here to replace a failing 1.5TB
Seagate. It's nice to see my choice backed up by data; none of the 3TB drives
in my price range were particularly well-reviewed.

