Reviews of Hard Drive Reliability?

ewhac asks: "After having three 18G drives go toes-up on me in the last two months, all of them done so after about 40 days of use, I want the replacement drives to be rock-solid. While Tom's Hardware and AnandTech review individual drives and their performance, I haven't yet been able to locate any comprehensive or cohesive review of drive reliability and longevity. Does such a resource exist?"

Comments

Never buy IBM Drives

[duffbeer703]

Just had two 18GB IBM SCSI (LZX) drives die after less than a year. Also had 6 bad disks in 5 months on a shark at work.

Never, ever, ever, ever buy IBM storage.

What's the real problem?

[uslinux.net]

I have several 9 and 18 GB drives in a mid size desktop, and they've been running for ages. I've used IBM, Maxtor, Seagate, Quantum, Western Digital, etc, and what I generally find is drives last about 3 years, which is really their useful life anyway. Some go longer, but in general, you should be able to count on 3 years.

So, if you're finding your drives die in 30-60 days, there's likely another problem you're missing. If you're using SCSI, I'd guess they're probably 7200 or 10k RPM drives, which means LOTS of heat, especially if you have several. So, first of all, go buy a few 60 or 80mm fans, and stick them in front of the drives, if you can. Get some air flow across them (remember, air pushed across the drives does much more than air pulled/sucked across them). Heat will quickly kill a drive.

Barring that, you haven't said how the drives have died (won't spin up, unusual read errors, etc), but a poor power supply, especially one running at capacity could burn out a drive. Finally, any sort of shock (case constantly being moved, bounced around, kicked, etc) could do a drive in, though that is probably less likely.

As with anything else, it's all IMO, YMMV, etc.