Backups [was Re: Is tape dead?]

[Al Kossow]

>> Up until now, I've confined my purchasing to 500GB drives on the
>> hope that they're more reliable than the 3-5TB monsters.  Is this a
>> mistake?
>

1tb was the transition to vertical recording. They had the tech down by 2tb.
Seagate 1 and 1.5s are utter crap. I had a dozen 1.5s that NEVER worked. The
largest PATA drives ever made were Seagate 750gb and I had dozens of them
in Xserve RAIDs.

Most of the drives are dead now.
I've replaced them with 1tb Toshiba 2.5 SATAs with PATA/SATA adapters.
The arrays run a hell of a lot cooler now.

I've been buying consumer Hitachi (the line was taken over by Toshiba after
WD hung onto only the Hitachi enterprise line) from 2tb onwards to 6tb without
any problems. We were forced to buy about 200 Seagate 3tb at the museum when
we couldn't get any Hitachi, and we're down to 80 spinning after about a year.
We lose a couple a week. They will be replaced with 4tb Toshibas starting in Oct
(we're almost out of Hitachi 3tb spares).

Word on the street is stay away from WD for the near future. They've had massive
QC problems.