Backups [was Re: Is tape dead?]

[Sean Caron]

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
>
>