Netflix CND Storage Hardware

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Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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I sent them a note a few weeks ago. Trying to get more information for folks, but have reviewed quite a few of the components including the motherboard and NICs.
 

odditory

Moderator
Dec 23, 2010
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They are using 5k3000 and Seagate 7200.14, find it odd they use 7200,
Those are the exact drives they would want to be using for that configuration, in that order, and its not surprising. They started out intending to remain standardized on the Hitachi 5K3000's but due to the Hitachi buyout had to seek out the next best thing which is the 7200.14, because up until the WDC Reds, WDC had nothing for this segment and even now they're a question mark since WDC put measures in place to limit them in configurations greater than 5 drives. As the page states they were influenced by Backblaze's testing and stats and one of the things Backblaze have indicated was the failure rates on Hitachi's was less than half the next closest brand (and that wasn't anecdotal, they based that on a sample size of over 9000 Hitachi's), so thats where the Hitachi pick came from in addition to most of the rest of the methodology employed in the build.

I'm sure it burns up WDC and Seagate to hear large installations like Google, Backblaze, Netflix etc are opting for large quantities of commodity desktop drives placed in highly redundant configurations, but too bad. They'll have to adapt and overcome. Just like some of these companies have in getting creative in their strategies to reach price & performance targets, so too will HDD vendors have to rethink things and perhaps make enterprise offerings more attractive since the margins there are still bloated.

As for it 'seeming odd' they use a 7200 RPM spinner, the reason is the Seagate 7200.14 made the RPM metric somewhat trivial and closed the gap with the performance characteristics typical of 5KRPM spinners. With the 7200.14 generation 1TB platter drives Seagate realized the difference between running at 5KRPM and 7200RPM was so trivial that building out two lines was pointless, when at 7200RPM not only did it hold on to increased performance but temps and power draw were in line with that typical of green 5KRPM drives. And the performance of the 7200.14 is screaming for a spinner. I remember when I first read Seagate's explanation that they didn't bother building a separate "green" line for the reasons I mentioned and being extremely skeptical but in my testing over the past few months it turns out they weren't lying.
 
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Patriot

Moderator
Apr 18, 2011
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I initially freaked about the micron SSDs.... but it is a read only workload... so... they don't totally suck for that and they are dirt cheap.
 
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