[lug] 1 T HDDs

[Sean Reifschneider]

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
-- 
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability