How To Build A Cheap Petabyte Server: Take Three

[YeOldeStonecat]

Well I'll be sure not to sign up as a reseller of BackBlaze...seeing they push (and use themselves) consumer grade HDDs.

WD "Blue" drives....I swear sometimes it seems like 50% failure rate. I won't use them for our clients anymore. I've had to replace far too many of them.

I've yet to have a WD RE4 drive fail..the best of the best of enterprise SATA HDDs. A month ago I replace an RE4...suspecting it of corrupting....it was in the fax server of a big insurance company. But further troubleshooting took away the fault of the HDD...so I replaced it without need.

We rarely have to replace WD Black edition drives either...off the top of my head I can't recall the last time I've replaced one of those.

We just got in our first deliver of WD "Red" drives....we are ordering a big Synology RS2212rp+ unit for our own office and will be populating it with Reds.

 

[iwod]

Speaking of HDD, anyone know where HDD is going next? In All Previous generation a major, known successors has been proved to work and pretty much allow a smooth migration path. It seems we have pushed PP Recording to limit and yet HAMR nor Bit Pattern are Ready.

Where are the 5TB or 6TB Drives?

 

[thiggins]

Well I'll be sure not to sign up as a reseller of BackBlaze...seeing they push (and use themselves) consumer grade HDDs.

This is really apples and kumquats, Cat! You are talking normal single-box RAID-based NAS. Backblaze is using hundreds of pods as part of a much larger system that is designed to tolerate drive failures.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

This is really apples and kumquats, Cat! You are talking normal single-box RAID-based NAS. Backblaze is using hundreds of pods as part of a much larger system that is designed to tolerate drive failures.

Oh I know they're not storing their clients stuff on a single giant RAID 1 NAS unit....I know they have farms and farms of huge arrays. It's the concept of..seeing them go for big cost savings...where else do they skimp?

And after 3-5 years...where did that cost savings go?
Slap in a ton of RE4 drives....let them run reliably for 5+ years.
Or slap in a bunch of cheaper drives....replace a good percentage of them once or even twice over a 5 year period. Paying some tech monkeys to do the hot swaps.

 

[thiggins]

It's not like these guys are making money hand over fist. So if it's cheaper for them to replace failed drives and no data is lost, then it's strictly a business decision.

 

[Jeffspears]

One thing that must be said here is say that 4 years passed using consumer grade HDDs without many failures the savings would be huge.

and even if the failures amount to a single digit which worset case senario is 9% that would accomulate to 36%. Leaving the 64% as cost saving and thats alot and worth the risk. After all if you are running a datacenter trying to save infrastructure costsis key in developing.

I would really be interested in the stats that they will post on failures and which brand of HDD, I would imagine something like 3-4% Failure annually but the breakdown of the failures would be most interesting.

 

[UrbanVoyeur]

SSD, power supply, CPU and storage card choices

Things I'm curious about:
- Why not use mirrored SSD's for the boot drive? - fast, cool, cheap and stable

- Why not use a SAS/SATA card like this is 8 port: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101358
One of these is cheaper than two syba card and has a higher port density and through put.
There are also 6 GB models such as this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816117296

-Isn't the power supply overkill? How efficient is it?

- Why not go with a 35 W CPU that produces less heat?

 

[thiggins]

I suggest you post on the BackBlaze blog if you'd like responses.

 

[UrbanVoyeur]

I suggest you post on the BackBlaze blog if you'd like responses.

I did. I was wondering what folks here thought too...

 

[UrbanVoyeur]

If you can put together a disk-less 45 drive system for under $2k using largely off the shelf components at near retail prices, it strikes me that we are getting fleeces by most of the small NAS companies.

 

[thiggins]

If you can put together a disk-less 45 drive system for under $2k using largely off the shelf components at near retail prices, it strikes me that we are getting fleeces by most of the small NAS companies.

I wouldn't say buyers are getting fleeced. You need to factor in the manufacturing, support warranty and software development costs.

But, yes, they are making decent margin on higher-end models.