Why We Decided to Offer Enterprise-Class Drives to Our Customers

[45Drives]

http://45drives.blogspot.ca/2015/06/why-we-decided-to-offer-enterprise.html

[SImoHayha]

What

[Agazed]

Very cool...................

[AnonymousGuy]

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/

 

Assuming an above average annual chance of failure of o consumer drive of 10%, after 5 years there's a 60% chance the drive will be fine.  If someone is popping a drive 3x a month then there's something broken with their physical setup.

 

Enterprise drives cost 3x as much as consumer drives.  60% of the reliability for 33% of the cost....cheaper to swap dead drives out as they fail than to put up the upfront cash investment.

 

EDIT: Woops I fudged the math.  The enterprise drive with a 3% annual failure rate has a 85% chance of surviving 5 years.  so you're getting 70% of the reliability of an enterprise drive for 33% of the cost.

[79wjd]

cheaper to swap dead drives out as they fail than to put up the upfront cash investment.

It's not all about being cheaper. The added reliability is often worth the extra money -- there's a reason why companies usually prefer to pay for enterprise grade hardware even when they know it's not cheaper in the long run.

[AnonymousGuy]

It's not all about being cheaper. The added reliability is often worth the extra money -- there's a reason why companies usually prefer to pay for enterprise grade hardware even when they know it's not cheaper in the long run.

 

Obviously there's *someone* who's going to be willing to bloat up Seagate's profit margin figures, but none of them are probably reading articles about whether to choose consumer or enterprise

[TheMcSame]

Enterprise drives cost 3x as much as consumer drives. 

Consumer grade Deskstar 7k2000, still very capable in enterprise use, they've proved themselves in Backblaze's data centre.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002OWT61Q/?tag=pcpapi-20

 

Enterprise grade Ultrastar A7K2000.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002XHLLH4/?tag=pcpapi-20

 

Two of the cheapest 2TB drives on the market with a few dollars between the two. So much for 3x the cost.

[AnonymousGuy]

Consumer grade Deskstar 7k2000, still very capable in enterprise use as backblaze has shown

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002OWT61Q/?tag=pcpapi-20

 

Enterprise grade Ultrastar A7K2000.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002XHLLH4/?tag=pcpapi-20

 

Two of the cheapest 2TB drives on the market with a few dollars between the two. So much for 3x the cost.

 

Wondering if those are discontinued screwing with the pricing.  If you look at Hitachi's 4TB drives, the Ultrastar is $330 vs the Deskstar is ~$160.  Unless the enterprise version is only 42% more expensive than the consumer version, in my rough reliability math there's cost savings buying teh consumer version.