Budget Backups: Which is better
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Where are you getting an average failure rate of 30% from? That seems incredibly high and makes me wonder why I haven't experienced anything remotely close to it.
Like I said, it is literally impossible to determine the failure rate because it is based primarily around motion and temperature. Unless we are monitoring both at every moment of your drives' lives we have no way to know what your failure rate would be expected to be. Things as simple as how you carry the drive, how you unplug it, etc. are major factors.
And how is failure rate determined? For a spinning drive, the rough rate is 3% / year. But for a drive that sits on a shelf for a decade, the rate might be lower, but at the moment of being transported it might experience a 1% rate for that few minutes.
There are so many factors that you cannot actually have a number for this.
Compare it to the failure rates of cars. You can say that Ferraris have a global average of 5% have accidents per year. But those that drive faster have higher accident rates. But no matter how fast you drive it, if it sits in a garage for years on end, the accident rate for that particular car would be low.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@ajstringham said:
In all fairness, I've never heard of a spinning disk dying from "wearing out". Generally they die due to sudden power loss, power surges, or sudden and extreme environmental changes. Or water. But power loss and power surges are the most common reasons I see drives die.
Most will start to completely wear out as they approach 30 years. I've seen ones well over 20 that had no issues, but everyone was terrified to move them, even a few inches, as the vendor (Oracle) said that their experience was that they would last for years more, but any bump or movement and it was expected to be all over.
You would think with the size increases and power and cooling savings that moving to new disk would be worth the efforts - wow.. 20 years. If we go back to 1994, the average drive was what? 2 GB? consumer?
That would be pretty large for 20 years ago, even for a server.
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@Dashrender said:
You would think with the size increases and power and cooling savings that moving to new disk would be worth the efforts - wow.. 20 years. If we go back to 1994, the average drive was what? 2 GB? consumer?
The thing is that lots of businesses look at momentary costs (migration, purchases) and ignore ongoing operational expenses. No matter how little business sense it makes, many times these things are just left to rot.
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The chances of a second failure remain the same regardless of a first failure.
Statistical chances remain the same of course. Of course the statistics that it a user will have two drives fail are much harder to meet that one.
Statistics work both ways on this.
Sort of. The chances that you'll have two failures is low. But the chances that you'll have a second after you've had a first is not any lower than the chances that someone else will experience their first one. So while it works both ways, once one failure has occurred, it only works one way.
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@scottalanmiller said:
So let's say 10% have this. 0% have cheap SSDs that are big enough for normal backups. What I said was that SSDs would rapidly diminish in backup value as high speed WANs are already rolling out that completely negate their value in those markets and the WANs are rolling out faster than SSDs are growing. So by the time SSDs are big enough to useful for this to many people, the number of people who have a use for them will be increasingly smaller and smaller.
You think high speed WANs will hit the masses by next summer? I think 1 TB SSDs will be around $200 or less by next summer, considering you can get them for $400-$600 now. This probably means you'll be able to get 2 and 3 TB too.
I don't believe that high speed access is rolling out faster than SSDs are growing in speed and lowering in price, but if you have something to point me toward that shows this, I'd love to read it.
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@ajstringham said:
That would be pretty large for 20 years ago, even for a server.
20 years ago I had 1GB in my desktop. 2GB in a server would have been very easy to find. The 2.1GB SCSI drives were probably the norm by then.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Like I said, it is literally impossible to determine the failure rate because it is based primarily around motion and temperature.
You came up with the figure of 30%. Did you just make it up or what? I live in a mild climate, don't drop the drives and transport them in a padded container.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@ajstringham said:
That would be pretty large for 20 years ago, even for a server.
20 years ago I had 1GB in my desktop. 2GB in a server would have been very easy to find. The 2.1GB SCSI drives were probably the norm by then.
Funny how a drive size standard for servers is now, a mere 20 years later, a size of flash drive you can't even find anymore because it's too small. I think the smallest you can really get anywhere feasibly is 4GB, with most having gone to 8GB.
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@Dashrender said:
You think high speed WANs will hit the masses by next summer? I think 1 TB SSDs will be around $200 or less by next summer, considering you can get them for $400-$600 now. This probably means you'll be able to get 2 and 3 TB too.
Did I say that? I just said the SSDs will be getting big enough to be backup drives at a diminishingly useful rate as high speed network connections are becoming widely available at the same time. Backup scale SSDs don't exist yet, high speed WANs are widely available. So far, the WAN is massively outpacing the SSD in this use case. SSDs will find a place for this, but not like they would have as many of their markets are already gone because they even arrive and every day high speed WANs have more and more saturation.
And 1TB SSD isn't enough for most and $200/TB is too expensive for most SMBs still. That's not a good price for backups. You'll find that that remains a very niche price/capacity ratio.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
You came up with the figure of 30%. Did you just make it up or what? I live in a mild climate, don't drop the drives and transport them in a padded container.
Yes, it has to be made up. There is no way to predict failure rates on a non-fixed drive other than it must be much larger than the 3% number of fixed drives. Much larger.
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@ajstringham the Seagate 2.1GB SCSI drive was 1992, for reference. 22 years ago!
I bet I still have some sitting on a shelf somewhere.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
You think high speed WANs will hit the masses by next summer? I think 1 TB SSDs will be around $200 or less by next summer, considering you can get them for $400-$600 now. This probably means you'll be able to get 2 and 3 TB too.
Did I say that? I just said the SSDs will be getting big enough to be backup drives at a diminishingly useful rate as high speed network connections are becoming widely available at the same time.
You said that WAN speed increases were outpacing SSD growth and lowering of cost.
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@scottalanmiller said:
And 1TB SSD isn't enough for most and $200/TB is too expensive for most SMBs still. That's not a good price for backups. You'll find that that remains a very niche price/capacity ratio.
It is? I suppose if the SBM is able to get 1 Gb WAN connections, sure, $200 might not be worth it, depending on the cost of cloud based storage - but there have been and always will be cheap companies who don't want to pay a recurring fee and would rather pay for the $200/TB drives for local backups.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@ajstringham the Seagate 2.1GB SCSI drive was 1992, for reference. 22 years ago!
I bet I still have some sitting on a shelf somewhere.
Sounds like it's time to toss 'em. You'll never use them again.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@ajstringham the Seagate 2.1GB SCSI drive was 1992, for reference. 22 years ago!
I bet I still have some sitting on a shelf somewhere.
History of drives
http://www.pcworld.com/article/127105/article.html -
@Dashrender said:
You said that WAN speed increases were outpacing SSD growth and lowering of cost.
Exactly. SSDs have not become useful for backups yet and it is only predicted that at some point that they will (and they likely will.) But at the same time, WANs are already widely useful for backups with speeds getting much faster all the time. So while one hopes to someday be useful for niche use cases, the other is already broadly useful today and becoming more useful every day with the long term prediction of being the last remaining backup media at some point. So WANs have both the lead and the predicted winning outcome. SSDs hope to have a spike of utility somewhere in the middle of the WAN backup timeline.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
You said that WAN speed increases were outpacing SSD growth and lowering of cost.
Exactly. SSDs have not become useful for backups yet and it is only predicted that at some point that they will (and they likely will.) But at the same time, WANs are already widely useful for backups with speeds getting much faster all the time. So while one hopes to someday be useful for niche use cases, the other is already broadly useful today and becoming more useful every day with the long term prediction of being the last remaining backup media at some point. So WANs have both the lead and the predicted winning outcome. SSDs hope to have a spike of utility somewhere in the middle of the WAN backup timeline.
Yeah, but most businesses don't even have 100Mbps WAN connections. Also, if they have satellite offices in an area that isn't a major metroplex, they might have a 3-10Mbps upload limit. I don't see WAN as outpacing SSDs for backup for anyone except the enterprise.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Compare it to the failure rates of cars.
I love your analogies. I know about as much about cars as I do about hard drives, but I'll have a go. Generally, most of the damage to a car is done starting it up, when the engine is cold and the car experiences a dramatic change in temperature. So, all things equal, a car that's done 50k miles based on long journeys will be more reliable than a car that's done 50k of lots of small stop and start journeys.
To me this is like hard drives. A hard drive that's run for a constant 1000 hours will be more reliable than one that is run for 10 hours, then turned off, then run for another 10 hours, then turned off, and so. This is one reason to keep servers on 24/7.
But, a car that's done 50k miles based on long journeys will NOT be more reliable than one that has done just 1k and then spent the rest of the time sitting in the garage. I believe a hard drive sitting in a cupboard has a lower failure rate than one sitting in a server being constantly used.
But I don't know.
But if you don't know what the failure rate is, you can't just make a figure up!
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
And 1TB SSD isn't enough for most and $200/TB is too expensive for most SMBs still. That's not a good price for backups. You'll find that that remains a very niche price/capacity ratio.
It is? I suppose if the SBM is able to get 1 Gb WAN connections, sure, $200 might not be worth it, depending on the cost of cloud based storage - but there have been and always will be cheap companies who don't want to pay a recurring fee and would rather pay for the $200/TB drives for local backups.
Cloud backup is not a requirement, that is an artificial cost constraint on WAN backups. Where are your SSDs planning to live? At IronMountain? If so, then your $200 price is nothing as the primarily cost is the shipping and storage. If not, are you planning on a second office site or a home? If so, then a single fixes two disk NAS is a one time purchase and the WAN is mostly funded through operations, not backup, budget. The cost of a WAN backup could be as little as about $600 for many, many years of backups.
To store an equivalent on SSDs would likely require $1200 - $4800 in SSDs plus the continuous shipping and manual management of them.
WANs can easily blow $200/TB out of the water for most use cases.
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@Dashrender said:
....but there have been and always will be cheap companies who don't want to pay a recurring fee and would rather pay for the $200/TB drives for local backups.
Sure, but while SSDs are not recurring, they feel like it as you need many of them (minimum of three probably, more likely 10 - 40.) And that's if your backup fits into 1TB. But WAN links are already there in 99.9% of companies (making that up, I suspect much higher rates today) so going to faster ones will happen naturally as speeds just increase.
I never suggested SSD backups didn't have a place. Only that their value was diminishing before they even existed and would continue to diminish over time. They are unlikely to ever be a significant backup media choice.
