[lug] 1 T HDDs

[Nate Duehr]

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