Hardware For Bulk IDE Hard Drive Burn-In?

r0gue_ asks: "I work for a mid-size OEM hardware manufacturer. We ship approximately 300 to 500 IDE HDs every month across all our units. Currently we experience about a 4% failure rate (Maxtor and WDs), though in recent months it has been a couple percent higher. The problem is our systems are dedicated boxes with a non end-user friendly form factor. Virtually every physical HD failure results in an RMA. What we are looking for is a hardware based IDE HD burn-in platform. Something that we could drop a dozen or so drives in at once, stress test them for a day or two, then put them into inventory for builds. I know the HD manufacturers and larger OEMs use them but I have not been able to track down anywhere we could purchase one. Right now moving to SCSI or a form factor that supports externally removable drives is not an option. I was hoping that the Slashdot community could point me in the right direction."

Comments

Here's a solution:

[Swift Guru]

For the love of God, don't use Western Digital or Maxtor drives. It's like you're asking for that 4%.

Re:Here's a solution:

[tomoe27]

Western Digital: I've owned several western digital drives over the past decade, and none of them have ever failed me. At my workplace, I've found old WD drives in Pentium I PC's that have been in service for 6+ years without a single problem.

Maxtor: I've been plagued with problems from maxtor drives over the years. From one original Maxtor i've bought (and it's RMA replacements), i had 2 that had spindle motors that became abnormally loud, one catastrophically fail (IDE Auto-detect had problems even detecting what the drive was), and then the last one i had started failing (with SMART warning, at least) about 5 days after my warranty period ended.

Seagate: I've never used any of the newer seagate offerings, but my older seagate drives lasted for years before i replaced them with higher capacity drives.

Quantum: Most of the quantum drives (standard 3.5" form factor) i have encountered at my workplace have performed reliabily over the years, recently however we've started seeing a bunch of them failing, but considering most of them are 4+ years old, it's not a bad track record. I recently had a quantum bigfoot die last fall, but even that was close to 4 years old also. (Just what exactly prompted quantum to make this strange hybrid form factor bigfoot anyways?)

IBM: The older drives were great, and I used to love their service, i would contact their support and they would do an advanced RMA with no problem. However on my most recent experience with them in Fall '02 getting an RMA on a drive less than a year old, they told me they couldn't Advance RMA me a drive, i would have to use standard RMA, which including shipping times, would take almost a month, which was quite unacceptable. Not to mention how their newer drives had a problem with failures.

Re:Here's a solution:

[afidel]

That 99th percentile is based on barely enough drives for it to be rated (just over 60) so it doesn't mean much, most of the drives have hundreds of units in the database. Besides I think the database is in many ways flawed as most people who list their drives will do so because they have had a failed drive. The best way from my perspective is to look at what companies with hundreds or thousands of drives are doing. Rackspace switched out all of their IBM IDE's for Maxtors, google uses Maxtor's, and the recent IDE backup unit featured here used Maxtors. But maybe I'm just biased because as an OEM I had tons of drives from almost every manufacturer die on me except for Maxtors.

Re:How-to

[torpor]

It's kinda stupid to only do *8* disks at a time, when you can easily do 64 ... using Firewire.

My advice would be to investigate into as many Firewire->IDE convertors as your company can afford, and then use a Firewire-friendly OS to do the burn-in. Something like OSX or Linux would work very well in this case - actually, a cheap Apple machine would be perfect for this application.

There's no need to start things up in batches with Firewire, either. You can plug in a disk, and your 'stresser' program can be written in a way that it just picks up that disk, stresses it, and reports failures along the way.

Would be a very simple project. If you want specific help, feel free to contact me ...

Re:Western Digital and Maxtor are equal?

[GigsVT]

Addendums to your message:
With a true 400 watt power supply, you can easily power 16 drives reliably. For reference, 8 drives pull a total of about 5-6 amps on 12v spin up, for about 1 second, then together use less than an amp on 12v, and very little 5v. This is based on testing with Maxtor 5400rpm drives, 7200 probably use a little more, and other brands may vary.

Power specs given in hard disk spec sheets are mostly boilerplate and do not reflect actual power consumption, the actual consumption is usually much lower than the spec.

ATA doesn't support delayed start, your power supply has to be able to take the full startup. 3ware makes controllers that support up to 12 drives, and hot swap when you use thier hot swap bays. A setup like that isn't cheap compared to the Promise card, but it may be worth it if you are testing hundreds of disks.

Why not

[Froze]

buy a few IDE raid cards and set them up raid one? This impliments a full mirror of data on the raided devices. Then perform burnin on the raid device.

Note: I have never implimented raid and am not an expert, so this idea would need to be independently verified.

3Ware card + Removable Hard Drive Bays

[MetricT]

We have several IDE fileservers at work. Each box is equipped with two 3Ware 8-port controllers, and 16 removable drive bays. Stick a 17th drive in there as an OS drive, install Linux, and run benchmark of your choice. Once you're happy with the drives, just pull the bays and swap in new drives.