Use Cases: Backblaze and Western Digital HGST drives ...
<< I swear by HGST hard drives, and this very thorough Backblaze data (49,056 hard drives tested) seems to bear this out ... >>
I'm sure Western Digital is very appreciative of the fact that you swear by the HGST branded drives they manufacture and distribute. The Backblaze Blog is very intereting but hopefully you have followed it from the time it began to be published or backtracked it to its conception.
It's important to understand why the use case of the budget online storage company is so radically different from that of virtually anyone that contributes regularly to this board or follows it and why there are so few Western Digital drives (as opposed to Western Digital manufactured HGST drives) spinning 24/7 in their 45 to 60 unit storage pods for multiplexed 3.5" SATA internal drives. Likewise why they have so many Seagates and still have such a large population of legacy Hitachi manufactured SATAS (now lumped with WD HGST SATAs) many of which were procured (farmed) after the 2011 Thailand floods when high volumes of drives (or even small volumes) were extremely difficult to procure at a reasonable price.
Their latest Blog update May 17th, 2016) is here backblaze.com
... and in it they state:
"We often get asked why we don’t buy more WDC and Toshiba drives. The short answer is that we’ve tried. These days we need to purchase drives in reasonably large quantities, 5,000 to 10,000 at a time. We do this to keep the unit cost down and so we can reliably forecast our drive cost into the future. For Toshiba we have not been able to find their drives in sufficient quantities at a reasonable price. For WDC, we sometimes get offered a good price for the quantities we need, but before the deal gets done something goes sideways and the deal doesn’t happen. This has happened to us multiple times, as recently as last month. We would be happy to buy more drives from Toshiba and WDC, if we could, until then we’ll continue to buy our drives from Seagate and HGST."
As for home use, back in 2013 "Backblaze said it would stop buying Seagate LP 2TB drives and Western Digital Green 3TB drives, because they just don’t work in the company’s environment. Part of the problem, Backblaze says, is these drives are designed to spin down when not in use to save power. That’s a great feature for a home PC user, but in an industrial environment Backblaze says the drive would spin down only to spin back up a few minutes later. The end result being more wear and tear on the drive than it was designed for."
An Overview of Backblaze storage pods is here backblaze.com and through 6 generations (click on links for each gen description) it is here: backblaze.com . There storage vaults are described elsewhere on their blog.
Wise to note that as of 2016 Backblaze no longer has any 1 TB drives in service. Other than boot drives Backblaze has never had any 2.5" drives or USB (Firewire, Thunderbird) connected Portable 3.5" or 2.5" backup drives in service. Anyone interested can purchase the latest Backblaze 60 unit storage pod for a mere $6,000: backuppods.com
Cheers, - Eric L. - |
