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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?"
I commend the request for asking for real data.
Anecdotal evidence from people who have had drives of a certain brand fail on them and then say "never use this drive" is basically worthless. Even if you hear 5 or 10 people say that, ignore them.
What you need to know is if there are enough anecdotes to show that the mfgr's MTBF rate is inaccurate and the real rate is a lot lower than what they report (or a lot lower than other mfgr's). Or maybe if there is a certain batch of drives that are anomalous.
The question is: is the mfg's MTBF rate good enough for you and is it accurate?
www.storagereview.com has started a reliability database but I don't know if their data is statistcally valuable yet.
Jesus saves....And takes 1/2 damage.
the storage review reliability index should serve you well. Unfortunately the site itself may be taken down soon (due to financial reasons), so get there quick.
Four 36 gig drives on 16 in our array blew out last week. (Probably heat-related. We had some AC problems in the computer room but the room never exceeded rated temperature.) Two weeks before that, two 18-gig drives in separate machines died for unknown reasons. The 36-gig drives were IBM. The 18-gig drives were Segate (who, at one time, made the IBM drives). In the last two months, we've also lost a few Maxtor drives.
Except for the batch of drives in one array, the above is fairly typical. We have thousands of drives from many vendors and I can't swear one is any better or worse than the other. Hard drives all pretty much suck.
Sure, we all read about MTBF being 500,000 hours for new drives but that's a pipe dream. Drives burn out every single day.
If you have the money, buy a pair of top quality drives and mirror them. If you can't afford that, buy a couple of cheap drives and mirror them. Don't put important data on a single drive and expect it to be there when you get back from lunch.
InitZero