[Discuss] Who makes the most reliable hard drives?

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

Richard Pieri wrote:
> Backblaze is near line storage: they fill up disks to capacity, spin
> them down...

I believe they actually have a mix of usage scenarios. No doubt they
have some systems that operate as you describe, while others are more
like front line storage.

If this was not the case, then the way Green drives spin down would be
irrelevant.

I'd have to look at the original source material that the article was
based on to see whether Backblaze segmented their reliability stats
based on the type of usage.


> WD Green disks can be made to work sanely with a simple hdparm command:
>   hdparm -q -S 250 /dev/sdX

Right, and I've done that as well. I've even used Green drives in small
RAID arrays with no apparent problems.

The comment in the article did make me wonder why Backblaze didn't apply
this trivial tweak if they were using the drives in a scenario where
they were being used continuously.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA
"Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting."
http://www.theperlshop.com/