DEFCON 31 BRIEFING
Very impressive recovery, Humans! 2023 was a great proper return to the Forum. We took in 428 drives this year which brought us up to about 90% of the DDV’s full capacity. This was the last year of 6TB drives as DT trimmed the InfoCon drive content to fit for one final year of 6TB copies. (quick reminder that next year will be 8TB drives!) This year, we pushed out just one more drive than last year for another 2.6 petabytes of data out the door to the community.
We had a huge number of failures this year - more on that later. We also teamed up with the DefCon Discord Ops team to provide a way to let you humans know when your drive was ready to be picked up! More detail on that below as well.
General INFO
DC30 DDV at work
Our volunteers kicked ass this year! They were on point! We’re getting the hang of a quick setup as we were again able to start accepting drives earlier than planned! Our first duplication run started at about 3:30pm on Thursday and all our systems worked well. By 2:00pm Saturday, we had received 428 drives and started our final duplication runs.
We were able to duplicate every drive given to us with the exception of about 7. We remain consistent and (again) cleared out all of the available 6TB (or larger) drives in Vegas this year. Here’s the breakdown of our 2023 requests:
Infocon.org archive: 192
Hash Tables 1 of 2: 131
Hash Tables 2 of 2: 105
DDV Drive content requests
Even though some people didn’t pick up their drives before the 11:00am deadline on Sunday (you know who you are), we were able to get everyones drives back to them.
DRIVE DETAILS
This year we continued to catalog the brand and model of each drive. We were able to capture information for the 428 drives we received. This gave us a small sample of manufacturer information and we've dropped that detail for you below:
Intake by Manufacturer
DRIVE FAILURES
We had some significant failures this year. The intake went well but there were over 50 drive copy failures - many of which we were unable to overcome. We’ve been seeing several repeat drives and expect that the additional errors we’re seeing are due to drives starting to age. It looks like there were also large number of refurbished (i.e. cheaper) drives brought in this year and that raised the failure rates.
We’re updating data sets so next year is a good time to bring in some new 8TB drives!
INTAKE TOTALS
In the end we were able to duplicate over 90% of the drives given to us - including our first SSD! Here are this year’s drive totals:
DC31 DRIVE TOTALS
INTAKE FAILURES
6TB 8TB Total Failures # Failure %
147 281 428 54 12.6%
Its worth noting that 50% of our Seagate Enterprise (white label) drives failed this year. LOTS of low quality refurbished or old data center drives hitting the market right now - be careful what you trust your data to.
Admittedly, it’s a low volume, but the MAX (refurbished Dell drives) took home the “untrusted” award again this year with a 70% failure rate.
On the flip side, we didn’t have a single Toshiba drive fail this year! Here’s the full analysis of our drive intake and failures:
DRIVE Statistics
Manufacturer INTAKE FAILURES
Type % 6TB 8TB Total Fails % of Fails % of MFG
------------------------ -------------------- --------------------------------
Toshiba 13.6% 25 33 58 0 0.0% 0.0%
N300-15 5.1% 15 7 22 0 0.0% 0.0%
PX300 7.5% 10 22 32 0 0.0% 0.0%
White 0.9% 0 4 4 0 0.0% 0.0%
Seagate 38.3% 38 126 164 23 42.6% 14.0%
Barracuda 8.2% 2 33 35 2 3.7% 5.7%
Ironwolf 17.3% 1 73 74 7 13.0% 9.5%
IronwolfPro 2.1% 3 6 9 0 0.0% 0.0%
Enterprise 5.6% 23 1 24 12 22.2% 50.0%
EXOS 3.0% 9 4 13 2 3.7% 15.4%
Firecuda 0.7% 0 3 3 0 0.0% 0.0%
Skyhawk 0.5% 0 2 2 0 0.0% 0.0%
Terascale 0.9% 0 4 4 0 0.0% 0.0%
Western Digital 36.2% 57 98 155 13 24.1% 8.4%
Black 12.4% 33 20 53 2 3.7% 3.8%
Gold 2.1% 1 8 9 0 0.0% 0.0%
Purple 0.9% 3 1 4 0 0.0% 0.0%
Yellow (AE) 0.0% 0 0 0 0 0.0% 0.0%
Red 5.6% 7 17 24 2 3.7% 8.3%
Red (Pro) 2.6% 1 10 11 0 0.0% 0.0%
Blue 2.6% 4 7 11 0 0.0% 0.0%
Green 0.2% 1 0 1 0 0.0% 0.0%
White/EMAZ 7.2% 7 24 31 9 16.7% 29.0%
HCX (White) 2.6% 0 11 11 0 0.0% 0.0%
HGST All 8.4% 20 16 36 9 16.7% 25.0%
Dell All 0.9% 2 2 4 2 3.7% 50.0%
MDD (Max) 2.3% 5 5 10 7 13.0% 70.0%
SSD
Samsung 870QVO 0.2% 0 1 1 0 0.0% 0.0%
Making it happen
All drives are cataloged at intake
It was nice to get back into the swing of a normal con this year. We were in the middle of that action this year - right next to the Merch and Vendor areas. When are the Vendors going to realize that there are a lot of people looking for 8TB hard drives every year?
Once we dusted off our equipment, everything came together really quickly! QM Stores, the Goons, and Village support teams were phenomenal (as usual).
With everything powered up, we set out to use the 66 hour window of Defcon to accept, tag, copy, and return all the drives. The first batch started at about 1530. As usual, we keep an extremely close eye on all of the duplicators for anything slowing the process down.
There were a few um… speed bumps in the road (you know - fire alarms and ‘suspicious package’ events). While we did clear the building as needed, we made sure to secure the DDV as we usually do if/when it’s unattended. Since we’re running about 150 drive duplications at any given time and each drive typically takes about 12 hours to complete (on a good cycle), shutting down even for a minute would’ve seriously hurt our capacity - fortunately, we were able to keep running. It’s a non-stop operation - the duplicators only get a few minutes of rest between cycles when swapping drives out.
This year, we were able to partner with the Villages area to have the DDV talks on the main stage! Andy brought some great information around SSD reliability and his 10 years of experience with high volume drive management. We’ll post a link to his talk here when it’s availabe.
DDV DISCORD
With the help of the Def Con Discord Ops team, we were able to link your drive tickets to your Discord account so that you could get your drive status at any time - and get an automatic notification when your drive was ready to be picked up!
This was a big step forward for bringing Discord and meat space integration together for Def Con. There were so many people involved to make this work (Riverside, Respondo, Voltage Spike, Fox and more) - thank you all! We were lucky enough to be the test village for the bot and it seemed to work well. Look for more integrations like this in the future with Def Con - next year is sure to go even smoother!
Wrap up
In the end we were able to push a little over 2.5 Petabytes of data out the door to DefCon attendees this year! It was a nice, relaxing, and safe year - so far, no reports of village COVID! We’ve already started working on the improvements for next year. At the very least, we’re looking forward to the 8TB drive sources and improvements to the discord notification setup.
Remember, if you're one of those who wasn't able to get a drive in to us, all the content is also available through torrents via Infocon.org. If you have the bandwidth, please seed them too!
Big thanks to DT, Nikita, Hony, Paydreaux, the QM Stores, Goons, and all our volunteers for helping make DDV such a success this year! Stay safe until DC32!