Cloud service provider Backblaze has updated its earlier study of hard drive failure rates (Nov 2013) in its own infrastructure – from 27,000 to more than 34,000 drives, and the new report (Sep 2014) is quite informative. Hitachi comes out pretty high, Western Digital has produced some good drives, but Seagate tends to come out worst. Each brand does have good and not-so-good models so there’s no single right answer, and for any new model you’ll always be dealing with an unknown factor.

Backblaze also found that consumer drives actually perform well compared to enterprise grade drives, and once price is taking into account the enterprise drives just …

Some so-called “Green” harddisks don’t like being in a RAID array. These are primarily SATA drives, and they gain their green credentials by being able reduce their RPM when not in use, as well as other aggressive power management trickery. That’s all cool and in a way desirable – we want our hardware to use less power whenever possible! – but the time it takes some drives to “wake up” again is longer than a RAID setup is willing to tolerate.

First of all, you may wonder why I bother with SATA disks at all for RAID. I’ve written about this before, but they simply deliver plenty for much less money. Higher RPM doesn’t necessarily help you for a db-related (random access) workload, and for tasks like backups which do have a lot of speed may not be a primary concern. SATA disks have a shorter command queue than SAS, so that means they might need to seek more – however a smart RAID controller would already arrange its I/O …

As I described yesterday, Open Query is doing some tests on SSDs and other devices pretending to be harddisks (SANs, battery-backed RAID controllers, etc). To aid this, I wrote a small tool to test the different kind of I/O operations MySQL would/could do, which is not quite the same as what other general purpose apps would do, and also not what other test tools measure. For instance, it tries Direct I/O as well as fsync() after each write, and also it a range of different I/O block sizes.

In a nutshell, it’s aimed to do what MySQL does, without MySQL! Testing lots of different setups for this particular purpose (even with fantastic tools like MySQL Sandbox) is a complete pest, and changing InnoDB page size requires a recompile. While Percona has tried a larger page size in the past and decided it wasn’t worth it (the default is 16K), I thought it worthwhile to include …

My father and I got our 5D MkIIs on Friday and we could hardly wait for the batteries to charge. He took his to SF to test its vaunted low-light performance and posted this 60-second 1080p clip (along with other resolutions) on his SmugMug site: Click to watch it auto-sized for your monitor or check out the full 1080p resolution (caution – *high* bandwidth! UPDATE: Apologies if you tried to watch 1080p on Windows earlier. My bug made it look terrible. Try again, please?).

Here’s his story:

“I had seen Vincent Laforet’s amazing short film, but only in 720p. I knew what an amazing photographer he is and wondered how close an everyman like me could come to footage like that. Could the clips …