<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 Hitachi drives. If we (Backblaze) could get them at a rate within a few dollars of the other manufacturers at the 4TB level, we would solely buy them.
Normally diversification is absolutely the way to go, but once we've found a drive with low failure rates across the board, we'd want to move mostly to using that one drive type. We can always move over to another type of drive, but there's a very real cost of having to swap drives out as they fail, so the more reliable the drive, the more incentive to stick with it until it's no longer reliable. At the moment, we're more concerned about price, so we buy a wide-variety, but we have our favorites :)
> Normally diversification is absolutely the way to go, but once we've found a drive with low failure rates across the board, we'd want to move mostly to using that one drive type.
With regard to deployment, but also with regard to the drive reliability numbers you guys are putting out there: do you worry that variation between manufacturing runs is going to hose you? Do you find looking at the drives that you're getting a good variety of hardware from multiple manufacturing runs?
