[lug] Re: LUG Digest, Vol 53, Issue 11

William D. Knoche Bill.Knoche at Sun.COM
Tue Mar 11 13:46:26 MDT 2008


Nate, send me the part number and I will look up and see who 
manufactures the drives. Most of the drives Sun is using these days are 
Hitachi.
My experience here at home seem to follow most of yours. WD I stay away 
from, never had good luck.
Seagate drives are fine but it is usually the bearing that go and they 
do make you crazy from the noise when they do.
The enterprise class Maxtors have been ok for me.
I have replaced almost everything now with SATA/SAS (Seagates) drives 
with large capacities so have far fewer drives and they seem to be 
holding up well.
There has been so much consolidation in the disc biz that there really 
aren't very many choices (Seagate, Hitachi, or Fujitsu is about it in 
the enterprise class and just WD left otherwise).

--bill
>
> Subject:
> Re: [lug] 1 T HDDs
> From:
> Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>
> Date:
> Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:46:05 -0600
> To:
> "Boulder (Colorado) Linux Users Group -- General Mailing List" 
> <lug at lug.boulder.co.us>
>
> To:
> "Boulder (Colorado) Linux Users Group -- General Mailing List" 
> <lug at lug.boulder.co.us>
>
>
> Sean Reifschneider wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Almost 100% ditto what Sean says here.
>
> I have only one other comment... the Seagates usually get VERY noisy 
> before failure, if they fail the way I'm used to seeing them go.
>
> A quick listen to the servers once in a while will tell the tale... 
> you can hear the bearings going South.  They're usually "screaming" 
> loud by the time the drive craps out.
>
> This is somewhat true of Hitachi, and Maxtor too, but not as pronounced.
>
> WD just die weird deaths with little or no warning.  I don't use them 
> anymore unless they're free, and I RAID them... everything dies, but 
> WD seems to die more often... in my experience anyway.
>
> The only drives that seem to die without warning of any kind on a 
> regular basis are whoever Sun is using to OEM their fiber-channel 
> disks, like you use in the SunFire Enterprise 480.  Those damn things 
> just pop like a light-bulb and disappear off the bus, but they usually 
> last a few years of uptime before doing so.  Then they're just 
> "gone".  No noises, no warnings... poof.
>
> And they're expensive to replace new (refurbs aren't bad, but you take 
> your chances), but most of the ones I'm working with someone's paying 
> for Sun Gold or Platinum service contracts, so... we just call the 800 
> number and ask 'em to send someone over with a drive.  Spoiled, aren't 
> we?
>
> :-)
>
> Nate



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