how dose backblaze handle vibrations

[the gamer that is bad]

i want to 3d print a server like the 45 drives one but people said it would have to many vibrations but it appears they can use a flat piece of sheetmetal can you run drives without any vibration isolation without shortening the lifespan?

[Xaring]

So... first of all, you're supposed to use NAS drives in their servers... So that rids us of the vibration issue being a headache for the drives.
Second, the issue lies more in the material than the drives.

I own a 3D printer and use it for plenty of things. I build spacers, "holders"/brakets, union pieces etc, but no, i wouldn't build more than a 4-disk enclosure and expect it to survive long term. I do use 3D printed HDD Brackets, but the main frame is extruded aluminium and screws. 
 

[the gamer that is bad]

at my school i can print parts u to 1 square foot for free from abs and we have a metal shop so i designed it to hold on to a 1/4" pice of steel and i bet that would be strong enough.

[Jarsky]

They deal with it by brute force. They use consumer drives, and rely on losing x% of drives a day. 

That is to say, they have no special design in their storage pods for dealing with it, nor do they generally use NAS/Surveillance rated drives.

They replace drives every, single, day. 

 

Many consumer cases, deal with it by using rubber grommets as part of the mounting. 

[the gamer that is bad]

ok thank you 

i did not know they replaced drives so often

[Jarsky]

Just now, the gamer that is bad said:

ok thank you 

i did not know they replaced drives so often

It's the approach they've always taken. Keep in mind though that Backblaze have like 4 Datacenters, so its not uncommon to be doing drive replacements every day anyway.

Even if they were using all enterprise storage, they'd probably still have disks to replace every day anyway, so the cost saving of using more consumer/workstation grade equipment offsets the cost of replacing a few extra drives.

 

The company I work for has 6 DC's, and even the small segment I look after for a couple of dozen large customers I have to arrange to replace at least a couple of drives every week. Let alone our teams that actually do the large scale storage, or what our field technicians / DC custodians do outside of the jobs I give them. 

 

Pretty much an idea adopted by Google when they had to expand out of their garage.

When they first became big, they used consumer PC's...talking like ATX tower Compaq Presarios and Dell Optiplex's etc....and just sitting them on shelves to add processing power and storage. Whenever a desktop died, they just replaced it. They would be replacing a dozen or more PC's in a day during the early 00's. 

 

 

[Nick7]

Keep in mind that even enterprise grade storages do not have anything special in them to reduce vibration by drives, even when they were using 3.5" 15k rpm drives.

So no, it's not that big of a deal. Resonance is not good, definitely.. but not as much problem as it may seem.

[the gamer that is bad]

ok i have designed a 45 drive server you can 3d print but i do not have the budget to buy lots of large drives just to put another one in when i run out of storage and i much prefer to keep my own data 

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, the gamer that is bad said:

ok i have designed a 45 drive server you can 3d print but i do not have the budget to buy lots of large drives just to put another one in when i run out of storage and i much prefer to keep my own data 

How do you hook up so many drives on a budget? 

[the gamer that is bad]

i was just going to buy a hba card or something when i need one

[Blue4130]

1 minute ago, the gamer that is bad said:

i was just going to buy a hba card or something when i need one

That will get you 16 drives at most per card. Hope you have many Pci-e slots... 

[the gamer that is bad]

i have 3 so that would be 48 drives or i could add these nifty little things ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B072BD8Z3Y/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=dbtech-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=B072BD8Z3Y&linkId=9410c99e7b12c75f5f647e56a3cbff64 ) with my motherboards 6 slots and then add hba cards trust me i am used to junky solutions my skateboards exhaust pipe is held on by an ethernet cable and before you ask why my skateboard has an exhaust pipe it has a 36cc 2 stroke motor on it

 

[the gamer that is bad]

and i am going off topic sorry 

[mariushm]

You can use rubber/soft silicone spacers between the hard drive and the bay walls to reduce vibrations.

Here's an example of such standoff/spacer with neoprene : https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/essentra-components/QM1T/278892

 

Basically, you'd screw 4 of these to the corners of your drive, slide the drive in position in your slightly larger compartment, then gently screw the drive in... the drive's vibrations will be somewhat absorbed and reduced by the rubber between the drive and the walls.

 

 

You can 3d print your own drive cages.

You can have the sata power and data connectors floating in the air.

 

You can use use port multiplier cards to convert one port into 5 sata ports, or you can just use several pci-e hba cards

 

IF you want cheap, there's those old Gigabyte HBA cards with 8 sata 3gbps ports at around $10 : https://www.ebay.com/itm/Gigabyte-GC-RLE086-RH-LSI-1068E-HBA-card-8-port-SAS-SATA-PCI-E-array-card/132802744952

Though keep in mind I think they're limited to 2 TB drives or some low threshold like that, not sure.

 

Anyway ... 3d printing would be really silly. It would be MUCH cheaper to just get aluminum sheets and drill holes for the drive screws, the screw locations on hard drives are standardized.

 

Also, I'm surprised you didn't just DOWNLOAD the backblaze schematics, drawings and all the stuff you need, the 60 drive server is open source and all the stuff is available here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-server/

 

And yeah, they did improve their designs a bit to reduce vibrations, but overall for them it's cheaper to just buy drives and fill racks with them, and have data of people stored in multiple locations at same time, so if a drive fails, no biggie, they can just slide in another drive and if it's not more than 2-3 years old, they can rma the drive.

 

You can also look at statistics they post periodically, and see the average number of drives failing them each them.. it's probably an average of 1% AFR ... here's their latest blog post : https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q2-2020/

 

 

 

[the gamer that is bad]

wow thank you for all the information his really helped i was about to buy 15 6 tb was drives and then upgrade later when i need more storage but with the vibration dampeners i think i can get normal hard drives and save some money and depending on the complexity i may be able to make it out of metal.

[mariushm]

I would not recommend "normal" drives ... well, I guess depends what you mean by normal.

At the minimum, you should get NAS rated drives, or drives with at least 3 years warranty. 

 

Personally, I'd suggest going with HGST drives, though they're gonna be harder to find because WD seems to want to rebrand them under their logo (HGST is part of WD, but for a long time WD kept them separate due to various anti monopoly and stuff restrictions, but now they can merge the series)

 

If you choose WD (which I would choose over Seagate), pay attention to this page so that you won't get SMR drives, which don't work well for writes and in raid : https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/

 

On Seagate, the Barracuda drives (except Barracuda Pro) and some Skyhawk drives are SMR drives and should be avoided : https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/

 

The best strategy would be to just go with 8-10 TB drives, most likely they're gonna have the best price per capacity anyway.

 

 

 

[the gamer that is bad]

Thank you i would have gotten nas drives no mater what when i went to micro center one person said i would have to get Exos drives if i did not want to lose half my drives in a year but i cannot afford that may enterprise drives in a system like that. The one thing i am upset about tough is i spent a month to make my own 3d files of a 45 drives server in skechup free when i just needed to download them from backblaze for free.

[Blue4130]

2 minutes ago, the gamer that is bad said:

Thank you i would have gotten nas drives no mater what when i went to micro center one person said i would have to get Exos drives if i did not want to lose half my drives in a year but i cannot afford that may enterprise drives in a system like that. The one thing i am upset about tough is i spent a month to make my own 3d files of a 45 drives server in skechup free when i just needed to download them from backblaze for free.

I thought you were using free ssd's in your build. What happened to that idea? 

[the gamer that is bad]

i would have to never been able to find all this information n my own

[the gamer that is bad]

i gave some to my friend and started putting them in my families systems i still have about 25 or so but i just want a single server to manage i may use some as cash drives pr something 

[the gamer that is bad]

i have been just giving them to people i know i already put 4 in my case

[mariushm]

You definitely don't *need* Exos drives, they scared you, the nas rated drives are good enough.

 

Based on Google's hard drive study, if the hard drives survive the first 1-3 months of running 24/7 there's a high chance they'll work reliably for at least 3 years, and after that chances of failure increase.

See  Failure trends in large populations by Google, study based on loads of hard drives in their datacenters which they used at various temperatures, various amounts per server and so on : https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf

 

See pages 5-6 ... based on that, whenever I get a new hard drive, I tend to leave my PC running as much as possible (even 24/7) and copy stuff to the new drive every day, run movies from it ... but don't trust it with important data until at least 2-3 months have passed.

 

 

 

Temperature is also quite important... if you want a long life, best to keep them between 30..45c, ideally 30..40c :

Too cold can increase failures esp. when new (infant mortality).

 

 

[Jarsky]

21 minutes ago, mariushm said:

I would not recommend "normal" drives ... well, I guess depends what you mean by normal.

At the minimum, you should get NAS rated drives, or drives with at least 3 years warranty. 

Depends on the approach you take. 

WD Red's / IronWolfs, are about 30% more expensive than shucking drives. 

 

If you have 20 x 8TB drives, you're looking at $4100-4400 for NAS drives. 

If you do shucked drives, you're looking at $2900 for the same number of disks. 

 

From a raw cost perspective, you'd need to have at least 8 disks fail for it to have been worth buying NAS drives over shucking them. 

In one of my RAID's I have 16 x WD Red NAS drives, and it's no more reliable than my array with 12 x HGST White label drives that have been shucked. 

[the gamer that is bad]

Quick question how did you get so into this i want to get my first job because my first idea of starting my own in our metal shop is not going to work right now because my grandparents had a big fite and my grandpa is staying there and he moved his cars out there and i cannot risk hitting them. Before you ask why i need this server is because we are still making files they are smaller 10-20gb but we all have drives full of ideas there are about 6 of us all with varying drive sizes this has been in the works for almost 2.5 years now.

[mariushm]

2 minutes ago, Jarsky said:

Depends on the approach you take. 

WD Red's / IronWolfs, are about 30% more expensive than shucking drives. 

 

If you have 20 x 8TB drives, you're looking at $4100-4400 for NAS drives. 

If you do shucked drives, you're looking at $2900 for the same number of disks.

Well, not really ... because you don't account for warranty... if a WD Red goes bad within that 3 years, you can RMA the drive and get new one.

 

Let's say you expect 2 drives die on average each ear.

With your 2 spare drives, you're looking at $4400-4840 investment (depending if you buy 2 spare drives in advance or just buy one when a drive fails so you won't wait for rma), because as soon as a drive dies, you can put a spare in and RMA the drive and you get a new drive that goes right back to the spares.

With your shucked drives, you'd spend $2900 + 3 years x 2 x $145 = $3770 and if you want to have the same series (no guarantee you'd get same drive model a year or two from now, if the external drive model even exists anymore)

 

The shucked drives are at best warrantied for 2 years, but if you damage the case and can't place the drive back in external box to look as original, good luck rma-ing them.