Related topic: I'd like to see an update on the enterprise vs commodity hard drives.
A few years ago, the consensus (and data) was that they were mostly the same thing and it was arguable to pay double for the enterprise one.
But... in recent years, the consumer market have moved toward ever cheaper, slower and power savings hard drives (e.g. reduced RPM and stop the disk when unused for 30s).
> Related topic: I'd like to see an update on the enterprise vs commodity hard drives.
Yev from Backblaze here -> we wrote about this in 2013 and have honestly not bought too many enterprise drives since, simply because they were more expensive and the benefit was negligible in our usage. Lately though Seagate has had a nice run of enterprise drives and they're well-priced, so we might be giving those more of a shot in the coming months!
Yeah i think pricing is key and it looks like the different cloud storage providers all optimize for different types of storage (hot / cold). backblaze seems to be cheaper when storage is high and data transfer is relatively low (calculated via http://coststorage.com)
How is the benefit negligible? You are running consumer drives that are not designed to be run at a 100% load 100% of the time. The drives are not meant to be spun up constantly; in fact, many of them have mechanisms designed for them to spin down between use and lower power consumption. It's like complaining about a drag racer not being able to haul a ton of bricks without breaking the transmission on a regular basis.
Has anyone done a teardown of two drives and compared the materials? Many enterprise and OEM drives really just seem to be the same hardware as consumer drives, only with different firmware (the "power-saving" spindown) and more rigorous QC.
I believe when you're buying as much drives as they do and produce the kind of reports they do they measure and compare before reaching that conclusion.
The decision can't be made in isolation. They need to ensure that the extra cost of the drives makes up for the increased reliability - that's not necessarily the case.
Just deleting/re-writing, yes? I remember reading they were good for storage situations where you just fill the drive with writes and pretty much just read from it for life
A few years ago, the consensus (and data) was that they were mostly the same thing and it was arguable to pay double for the enterprise one.
But... in recent years, the consumer market have moved toward ever cheaper, slower and power savings hard drives (e.g. reduced RPM and stop the disk when unused for 30s).
That calls for a re evaluation of the situation.