[lug] 1 T HDDs

[Andrew Hoffman]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> karl horlen wrote:
> > drives currently out?  Any bad experiences or higher
> > failure rates with a particular brand or good
>
> We have clients that are using plenty 1T SATA drives and have had no
> particular problems.  But they're all buying the "enterprise" drives 
> for a
> bit of a premium.  I don't think any of these drives are over around 8
> months old though, so it's a bit early to say that any of them have
> particular longevity problems.
>
> I will say that I pretty much only buy Hitachi hard drives.  They've been
> very good to me.  I've had mixed luck with Seagates and fairly poor luck
> with Maxtor and WD.  We have one client that uses all of the above in one
> environment, and their rate of failure of the other discs is around an
> order of magnitude higher than with the Hitachi.  In fact, the reason I'm
> up at 8am is one of their Seagates dropped out of the array this morning.
>
> Over the last decade I've probably deployed 500 Hitachi drives and 
> I've had
> very few problems.  Even during the "Death Star" days I had no problems.
> The only problem I remember with the (in)famous 75GXP was one that 
> started
> generating errors.  I opened the case to replace it and when I put my 
> hand
> on it it was obviously running out of spec too hot.  I had 3 open drive
> bays in that tower, so I covered them to improve cooling, and the 
> drive was
> happy for at least 2 years after that.  Makes me wonder if the problems
> people were having with those drives were cooling-related, because 
> they did
> run hot.
>
> That said, I have run into problems with a set of Hitachi 40GB drives 
> that
> seemed to have firmware problems.  After around a year of running 
> without a
> power cycle, they would start generating errors until they were
> power-cycled.  Even a reboot wouldn't help, the system wouldn't even boot
> because of drive errors during boot.  But then after a power-cycle, the
> drives would run just fine.  Annoying for drives in a data-center, but
> because it's so infrequent and no data is lost I wasn't too annoyed.  
> Just
> replaced those drives with newer models and they've been happy.
>
> Sean
Check out this article from Google about hard drives 
http://216.239.37.132/papers/disk_failures.pdf
You may have read it but it does explain a lot.

I also owned a 75gxp drive and my first one lasted me a while but it was 
sitting open air. I refurbished it and my second drive only lasted me a 
few days. My third lasted several years but I cooled it like it was life 
or death.

-Andy