Lynn McGuire wrote:
"Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q1 2019"
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backb...stats-q1-2019/

"As of March 31, 2019, Backblaze had 106,238 spinning hard drives in our
cloud storage ecosystem spread across three data centers. Of that
number, there were 1,913 boot drives and 104,325 data drives. This
review looks at the Q1 2019 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the
data drive models currently in operation in our data centers and
provides a handful of insights and observations along the way. In
addition, we have a few questions for you to ponder near the end of the
post. As always, we look forward to your comments."

Uh oh, those 12 TB Seagates are trending up. I suspect that they are
not helium drives.

I wish that they had more WDC drives but apparently they are driven by
economics and WDC drives are definitely more expensive than Seagate
drives. I do not think that HGST drives are old WDC drives but I could
be wrong.

Lynn


ST12000NM0007

Some have an unblemished cover.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....L._SL1500_.jpg

Some have a circular addition, as if the cover had a hole
in it for some process step, and needed a cover afterwards.
Which seems absurd, considering how much trouble they go to,
to seal the top of the drive. It would not be like them
to make "decal decorations" for arbitrary reasons, so that
has some sort of function.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....ML._SX425_.jpg

Both units have the same part number. Some references are made
to "Malaysia", as if more than one plant makes them.

This is a picture of what is underneath the cover. There are two seating
planes. The inner plane is for the adhesive seal, the outer plane is
for the welded cover (so the user cannot put mechanical stress on
the sealing surface). And you can see the black thing in the lower right
corner of the picture, might line up with that circular thing above it.
I count eight platters. On the upper left corner, you can see the
filter pak for particulate. There are no gas-flow shaping barriers.

https://microless.com/cdn/products/f...30fdde8-hi.jpg

Based on design, it's a helium drive. If it was air-filled,
there would be a breather hole. Those platters would also be
"thinner that regular platters"

The more platters = more trouble.

Paul