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Are Newer And Faster IDE Drives Troublesome?
viperjsw writes: "Earthweb is running an interesting article on how there seems to be a failing trend in newer 7,200 RPM IDE hard drives. I am the lead hardware engineer for my co with four thousand 7,200 RPM ATA100 Maxtor and IBM hard drives. I have not seen any failure trends, though failure rates are at about 5-10%. Are Earthweb's reports verifiable?"
Also, with a faster speed, the spin-up will be more harsh on those drives.
I wonder how the failure rates of 10,000 and 15,000 rpm SCSI drives compares to those of lesser speeds.
Method of processing duck feet
7200 RPM drives run hotter than previous drives, and they must be cooled. Previously people rarely gave a thought to drive cooling, and if they don't take it into account now they will see large failure rates. If your drive is too hot to touch after running for an hour, then you need to cool it off.
I've been installing 7200 rpm IDE drives into servers and workstations for well over a year now, and the only complete failure I've had was one that didn't work from the start. I've had drive errors crop up from heat (put a fan in, seperate it from other equipment (don't sandwich it between the floppy and zip), etc) and from using a 40-wire IDE cable instead of the ata-100 80-wire cables.
FWIW, I've used Fujitsu until a few months ago, IBM, Maxtor, and few seagates. They have all been at the lower end of the price range ($99 wholesale - went from 10G to 20G and currently using 40G).
-Adam
I'm not sure about failure rates, but heat and noise can be problem with the faster drives. That's the general consensus among people upgrading ReplayTV and TiVo units. Granted, that's a special case where the extra speed is of no value, whereas acoustics are very important. Anyway, the point is that you don't get the extra speed for free.
The harddisks are really suffering if you start them up/power them down often, because they're mecanical and the material inside the disk is not that strong to support that. Therefore a lot more disks are failing in workstations than in servers. Heat is a really important subject, too!
Life sucks.
Lack of cooling is certainly an issue with 7200 rpm and faster drives. Since installing fans on all my hard drives, the number of failures has gone way down.
However, there is a more troubling issue:
How is it that you can now buy a 40 gig hard drive for less than $100? Simple -- the manufacturer cuts corners on quality and cranks them out by the thousands in third world sweat-shops.
IBM is now putting disclaimers on some of their hard drives, not recommending operating them for more than 8 - 10 hours per day.
But it seems that 5-10% is quite high. From what I recall from my fucking worthless stats class a few years back when .com wasn't tantamount to saying "I had a fucking posh job and got fired,", the 5% figure was statistically important. It seems that if a business has a mfg process, a failure rate of such a high percentage would be a sure fire way to seriously gang bang the bottom line. Is 5-10% fucking true?
Not all new drives experience this problem...specifically mentioned in the article is the Hydrodynamic Bearings, like are used in my newer Quantum Fireball AS Plus 60.
:)
So, the real culprit is the old Metalic Bearings that are still used in some of these drives...
So, what's the big fuss about? Well, it would be like an automobile manufacturer making a car without airbags today (only without that whole life or death thing)...
Yes, there's been some disturbing reports of various hard drives failing... when I bought my 40 gig, a number of maxtor 7200 drives were having problems (I went with the WD 5400... it was all they had in stock anyway), then there's the IBM issue...
While some of this can be attributed to bad products, it makes you wonder, with hard dirives getting bigger, are more people speaking out with complaints because they loose more? Or are more hard drives getting sold than ever, thus increasing the number of incidents that there's flaws (same # damaged per million, just more millions sold)
Just my musings... never had a problem with my hard drives yet.
I had some really bad experiences with one certain type of IDE drive... the 46 GB IBM DeskStar. We originally bought about 15, which all had to be replaced within about 3 or 4 months. The replacements died too. It did not matter if we installed them in desktops or servers (in the server, every drive actually had its own fan). Finally, we received 45 GB Maxtors or 60 GB IBM DeskStars, which have been working fine since. Funny thing is, the bad drives were manufactured in different countries, so it could not just have been a bad batch - more like a design flaw.
For enthusiasts (and anyone serious about reliability and speed), to lovingly configure a high-end Pentium 4 or Athlon system and then throw a bunch of IDE devices in it is absolute idiocy.
I've learned the hard way to cut corners somewhere else if you have to, but always buy SCSI drives.
I would take a Pentium 100 with SCSI disks over any Athlon/P4/whatever system with IDE disks. Spinning faster may make IDE disks fail sooner, but they're going to fail sooner anyway. The rule of thumb, I've found, is generally true: IDE drives are shoddily engineered, slow, and prone to failure. You get what you pay for.
SCSI disks aren't perfect, of course, but I would never trust anything important (much less a server of any significance) to IDE disks.
Where would I find reliability ratings for disks?
Actually, for me, two year old models should be fine. 40 Gbytes is way more than I need for most of my systems. But, I want a new drive, not one that's been sitting on a shelf for 18 months. An old drive probably has some new failure modes, hardening of the lubricants or something.
On a somewhat related note, does anybody have any experience with drive problems resulting from the physical mounting of drives at unusual angles (i.e., at a 45 degree roll or pitch, rather than horizontal or vertical)? Should one expect higher failure rates, or lower drive lifespans, as a result of unusual mounting arrangements?
:-)
Manufacturer specifications always state that drives must be mounted horizontal or vertical, but who ever pays any attention to the manufacturer....
Similarly for CD and DVD drives - are there any potential problems with mounting these drives at an angle? I have played around with mounting drives at angle; the drive trays etc seem to work fine when the drive is on an angle, but it is difficult to test long term performance or failure likelyhood when you only have one drive to play with.
The reason I'm interested: I'm working on a case mod, but it looks like I will have to mount the drives at wierd angles to accomodate the case geometry...
Thanks,
Russ Magee %-)
... and never, ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.
I have a Lian Li case with two fans in front of my HD going at full. So far I had two drives fail, and IBM 40gb and a WD 60gb, I had both RMA'ed but I'm hearing my repaced 60gb making funny click again :(
:(
All this in 6 months time.
I can also hear my geforce fan dying too
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
That's an assclown shitload of drives. What the hell are you doing with them? Or is that just what goes in the desktops at some megacorp?
Holy goddamn fuck dude, you're one really goddamn motherfuckin profane motherfucker.
:)
Nice to meet you
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
One got a ton of bad sectors. The other just doesn't work anymore.
My Fujitsu 40gig is working still.
God spoke to me
It's true, especially with hard drives...
--Heat--
I've seen a lot of posts about adequate cooling but sometimes there can be too much cooling.
Heat is accounted for and used in higher speed drives. It's use? Thermal viscocity breakdown.
I don't know what type of lubrication the drives use, but i'm about %100 positive it's made from silicone. Silicone grease doesn't conduct so if it leaks it won't cause any problems with the underlying circutry. We all know this from CPU fans.
What I'm saying is, you have a sealed bearing system on these drives. They use silicone grease. It has to get hot in order for it to *break down*. I am guessing that there is a certain point where chemically this stuff goes from grease to liquid.
When you're spinning at 7200 or 10,000 RPM's I would think that the bearing would need something non grease like, as in more liquidy to maintain those speeds.
Now before I get modded off as troll ask yourself, how many of these top of the line hard drive technologies have I actually worked with? Have high end SCSI drives allways been hot? Yes! It is by design, not by defect and people should really jump to conclusions about it. Your best bet lies in placement which I am about to cover.
--Placement--
I learned this from a ex fujitsu hard drive support person. If you are looking for someone to support you hard drives or other similiar products lemme know I can hook you up.
Placement of the drives is very important. Picture this... You have a small head, about the size of a match and it's floating on a cushion of air no wider than a few humans hairs thick. Think about all the laws of physics to make that trick work. Funny, we just had an article about a spinning disk creating gravimetric distortions. Anyways the drive's are engineered to be reliable at any 90degree angle. Anything other than that and you're asking for it
I can't affort those $2000 DLT tapes or to spend many hours feeding 10-20 CDRW to do backups, this is the most convenient solution.
The average consumer looks at $$$/Gig. No further. If the majority looked at failure rates first, then $$$/Gig. The industry would be a different story. At a certain point the number of failures to a particular drive creates word of mouth, "don't buy one of xxx drives". So the industry then tends toward the tolerable failure rate that it can get away with.
Personally, in the last year I've had more trouble with hard drives than the last fifteen years. I think it sucks!
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
The only problems I have ever seen have been on the IBM drives. I have a Western Digital and it's been great. Of course it is next to my zip and since i have purchased a CD-RW drive, my zip gets little use. If you have more then one Hard Disk and you have two 7200's mounted in the same place in the case, well that's asking for trouble. At work we have a 15,000 RPM SCSI drive in the worst environment of all....a 1 x server and it hasn't failed yet and it's been on 24/7 for a while now. Some may say that 1 x servers are great, but to me they are portable heaters...the air coming out the back is hotter then the air coming out of the mainframe (and it used to be the hottest thing in the room).
Gorkman
if you run, let's say a UDMA ATA66 controller, if you have some kind of trouble, the driver might force the OS to mark sectors as bad blocks -even if they were not. I had an IBM drive, and after rewiping the disk and testing many times, the bad blocks were gone.
So maybe many UDMA drivers are not up to date. Especially High-Point Tech (which Abit and others use) have many Beta-drivers which I do not trust completely.`
Does anybody know of a good source for aluminum/copper/whatever fin material to make a heatsink for a harddrive? IE: remove the stickers from the top, light coat of heatsink grease, apply large heatsink, maybe with zip ties or some form of clip. Maybe if the fins stuck up half the bay height, you could install the drive above upside down and do likewise with it, and place a grill in the bezel slot to allow air to be drawn over it by the case fans?
I tried google, and the closest thing I found was the The coolermaster Cool Drive, which seems to be crippled by the need to stay in a single 5.25" bay, and therefore probably dosen't supply anywhere near enough airflow space or fin area.
Cheap drives cut corners on motors, bearings, and well-engineered cases. So cool fast drives cost more money than cool slow drives or hot fast drives.
That is kind of a troll. This is done in almost all product. Thay are made as efficient as possible. And even expensive scisi drives fail. Thay are sometimes just the same as the cheap drive with the added scsi interface, and the price tag added.
if scsi then
price=price*4
end if.
Ok what is important:
-MTBF
-Service agreement ()
-Some technical specifations that are hidden deep in de documentation.