29 Nov
2010
29 Nov
'10
2:41 a.m.
On 11/27/2010 09:17 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 27 Nov 2010 at 17:24, Eric Smith wrote:
Well, lessee I have that system with a pair of Quatum D540s aka DEC RD52s
The system runs about once every few weeks and has done that since 1990
with those drives. It has not failed yet. My microVAXs have a bunch of
the
seagate 1.07gb drives that were revered for their longevity that are
sill operable
15 years since I got them and they were NOT new then.
Now in another place I had a set of servers one was populated with
a pair of MAXTOR 9GB UWscsi drives.. in actual use the mttf was 11months
(24x7) and in three years all four of those drives died. They were
replaced
with Seagate barcudas, two years later all four drives going strong.
Some drives were failure prone (anyone remember the Bigfoot drive?)
and some tended to had odd problems (micropolos 1325 with heads sticking
to the return bumper). And some seemingly similar drives Segate ST225
and ST250 had amazingly different reliability. I Have all my ST225s and
they
all work and none are less than 20 years old, most of the st250s never made
it to 5 years with intermittent use.
The point if not registering yet, is some drives were terrible (JTS and
bigfoot),
and some were not. A few like the seagate ST3660 were junk but the 3660A
was unbreakable, Seagate got a black eye on the early ones. I still have 4
low time 3660As in storage and two in use still.
Over the years I sought out used drives that were known to be better than
average and those that weren't known were used to their death. Some drives
will meet or exceed their MTBF and some don't. Of those that don't my
experience
is as a family they didn't. My collection of spares include those I
know from
experience have a better than average life.
However none of the standing drives I keep as spares have failed me and I do
cycle through them on occasion for archival reasons. They are spares and
also backups.
Oh, and speaking of drives said to be total crap I have a Syquest 270mb
removable cartridge drive (in an syquest parallel to IDE adaptor case)
and thirteen carts for it that is still in occasional use. Story is
those had
a failure rate of 99% in less than 6months. I also have a functional
500mb JTS
and a 2GB bigfoot that I've been waiting on to die forever. Must be lucky.
Allison
Anecdotal evidence suggests that leaving a drive
non-operational for a
long time is bad, and that spinning it for a few hours a month may
actually extend its life.
Aw, and I was about to propose a modest wager. I have a system with
a 20-year old hard drive that gets powered up for a short time every
few months. Over the next, say, 3 years, I'm willing to pay you $20
for every time the drive doesn't spin up when powered on once each
month if you'd pay me $20 for every time it did.