Backups [was Re: Is tape dead?]

The WDC REs are not bad drives at all but IMO Hitachi Ultrastar is the best line going right now. I have been working with them for some time from 0.5T through 3T under very high duty cycle and they are fairly bulletproof. The REs will do the work, but I have seen higher failure rates on them right out of the box and higher failure rates on them in the longer term (~3 years) versus the Hitachi. I am hesitant to trust Seagate for large scale enterprise use though I think they are fine to use at home, in lighter duty cycle applications or in USB enclosures, etc. The distinction you point out is very important particularly when selecting drives to use in constructing a RAID; it's critical to avoid those drives that attempt to spin down or sleep when idle; this confuses the heck out of RAID and will cause the admin (we, the builder) no end of misery... usually it's easy to identify these drives because they are marketed as "Green" or "energy saver" but for some of the midrange product lines ... "prosumer" ... sometimes you have to dig a little to get to the facts. I think these Green drives are the worst thing on the market since the old Quantum Bigfoot; I wouldn't recommend them to anyone. I suggest starting with the keyword "enterprise SATA" and going from there ... these drives are certified for array use 24/7 and ship without any "power saving" nonsense straight from the OEM ... the premium over a normal consumer SATA disk is not really too awful. These generally use identical or very closely related HBAs to the premium SAS disks but just with different SATA-only formatter board. No real need to go SAS unless you require multipath. Best, Sean On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 4:56 PM, Alexander Schreiber <als at thangorodrim.ch> wrote: