Reliable hard drives

[Craig Sjoquist]

Interesting since I know you all need bigger hard drives to run those huge wrap files etc.
http://www.behardware.com/articles/843-6/components-returns-rates-5.html

 

[visual800]

Messing with computers since 2000 I have had every brand of hard drive crash on me for no reason at all. I dont think one is better over the other. they are all manufactured the same way and possible by the same group of hands and IMO one day they WILL die, its just a matter of when.

 

[rjssigns]

Reliable and hard drives in the same sentence.:ROFLMAO:

Seriously though. The report reinforces what I've been telling people all along. The bigger they are the faster they fail. An IT guy said for what I'm doing it would be better to do a RAID with half gig drives since they don't have near the failure rate.
A client of ours is rolling out a 3U format rack with a peta-flop of storage. Drool. Told him I would be a beta tester. He laughed.

 

[James Burke]

Lots of eggs require several good baskets...


JB

 

[choucove]

This idea has been echoed in previous discussions with the same kind of theme: Hard drives fail. It's not a question of "if" but only "when". Be prepared with a good backup plan, and if you need to minimize the effects and downtime of a hard drive failure, look into RAID.

Hard drives are going to continue to get higher capacity and as such the potential software failures and complexities of data densities will also grow.

Personally, I feel that all electronics hardware somewhat mimics this result. It seems that as things have progressed, and as technology has become cheaper, more and more manufacturers are accepting a lowered standard of quality. Take a look at the netbook phase of computers where the general consumer attitude with computers was often, "It's cheap, so if it breaks I'll just toss it and get a new one." It's somewhat become an age of disposable technology, so manufacturers are beginning to accept a shortened average lifespan or decreased quality as that's what the market has lead to. This is evident in the hard drive industry where last year most of the major manufacturers decided they would greatly reduce the warranties of their hard drives from three or five years to just one or two years.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

I can honestly say that just like those findings I've had 4 Samsung F3's in raid-0 for 6 years with no rebuilds or data errors... They are the best HDD purchase we have made. I would hesitate to purchase larger drives and would rather stick with more of these in raid 10 for extra security.

 

[visual800]

my dell came with 1tb drives, I looked into getting 500 gigs and putting the 1TB on ebay, it didnt appear that would benefit me as theTBb aint moving like the 500gigs. I dont need 1TB of damn space Ill never fill it up and I wouldnt want to cause as I said one day its gonna die

 

[dypinc]

All hard drives will fail at some point. But you will get a lot more mileage out of them if you don't put them through heating and cooling by shutting them down.

 

[ICeMAnAbk]

Western Digital makes a very good HD. I've had a few last me 10+ years. SeaGate, Im not too fond of, I've had them break down rather quickly. Maxtor are good drives, not as good as Western Digital in my opinion though.

Above all, I wouldn't put my faith in any one HD though. if it's important, back it up, often. You can link 1 or 2 slave drives in your Computer and setup Sync folders in them to sync all your work. Keep the computer on overnight and set the transfer up for say... 9PM. gives it almost 11 hours to snyc information. It doesn't rewrite everything, just anything with a last accessed date on it or that wasn't in the designated foldfer before. At first, it seems like a pain in the *** to set this up, but I assure you, once it's setup it's worth Syncing folders.

Also, you can buy a HD Toaster. Makes internal drives into big memory sticks. I have 12 80g HDs laying around I throw random stuff on. Pictures movies knick knacks. Doesn't require a restart to boot the drive up either which is nice.

 

[SightLine]

Another thing to consider are Enterprise class drives. Typically they are SAS, Fibre Channel, SCSI although there are a few SATA designated enterprise class drives as well like the WD RE and Seagate Constellation ES series. Enterprise drives typically have double the rated life expectancy and warranty of desktop drives and they do undergo a much stricter QC process and are generally produced with some more higher end tighter tolarance components. Of course enterprise drives usually only come in servers or true professional workstations. All of our general use desktops just have regular consumer grade drives, only the pro workstations, the 2 servers, and the SAN use enterprise class drives and we of course have a backup routine for all critical data.