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?"

Comments

Momentum and heat

[Deagol]

From what I gather, the speed of the drive has a positive relation to the heat of the drive. I don't know whether it's due to friction (the bearings?) or the power consumed. With increased heat comes a reduction in the life of the supporting electronics. Also, a higher temperature change when powering on and off will mean more wear-n-tear, too.

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.

They have special requirements

[stienman]

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

Re:They have special requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using 7200 RPM (SCSI) drives for many many years, and never had any particular problem cooling them. (Did have some issues with the early 10K Cheetahs though. Something like this helped.)

My guess is that there's other engineering factors going into the heat equasion other than just the RPM number.

Re:They have special requirements

[stienman]

You can have any two:

• Cheap
• Fast
• Low to no cooling requirments

Of course your 7.2k scsi drives run well - first of all you don't put them in cheap, poorly designed cases. Secondly they are not inexpensive, and much of that extra money goes toward making them last longer - one way to make something last longer is to lower its heat buildup.

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.

-Adam

This is to be expected

[rudy_wayne]

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.

Re:This is to be expected

[cymen]

Go see StorageReview.com's main page... No need to spread FUD.

Re:HDD failure due to mounting angle

[hamjudo]

are there any potential problems with mounting these drives at an angle

Those drives, no. Some 5 1/4 inch drives needed to be reformatted if you mounted them a different way. All the 8 inch drives were like that. I've never seen a 14 inch drive mounted anyway but horizontal. It would be bad.

As the disk drive arms get shorter, the less the angle matters. I've never heard of a laptop disk crashing because someone turned the laptop on its side.