15 Sep
2015
15 Sep
'15
2:03 p.m.
I ride herd on maybe three or four thousand Hitachi Ultrastar A7K{2,3,4}000
2 TB and 3 TB disks and they take a real pounding with the workload here
and they have just been fantastic ... great drives; very solid ... Also
used the WDC RE4 when Thailand got flooded out a few years ago and we were
in a pinch ... they've been pretty good as well ... not quite as good as
the Hitachis, but not awful (a moot point now that Hitachi owns WDC, I
suppose).
I don't trust Seagate quite to the same level however I think they're fine
for lighter-duty server or certainly home environments ... it's hard to
find a truly bad drive these days (although they are certainly out there
... the WDC 2 TB "Green" unit will always stand out in my mind).
Best,
Sean
On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 4:54 PM, Ali <cctalk at fahimi.net> wrote:
In the case of
spinning rust, what brand is most reliable? I've seen
dreadful reports of DOA drives from Western Digital, fewer from
Seagate,
but I don't know about Hitachi, Samsung, etc.
Caveat: my experience is as a home "power user"
In my experience it all depends: I have a set of Seagate "consumer grade"
SATA drives that are now nearly 10 years old that have been spinning in a
RAID 6 almost 24x7 w/o issues. These were bought when Seagate offered a
FIVE
year warranty. I've also bought a number of the same type of drives in the
past five years but with only a three year warranty and the failure rate on
those have been abysmal!
Now days I buy "enterprise class drives" (have a RAID 6 w/ 4TB Hitachi
drives and RAID 5 setups w/ Seagate ES and Cheetah drives). They cost a
pretty penny but the peace of mind is worth it. The also have better
warranty service.
I've never bothered w/ WD drives so I can't comment on those.
If I could find a cheap tape backup solution I would love it but anything
capable of reasonably backing up 20TB is well out of the consumer pocket
book.
-Ali