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Flurry of Hard Drive Reviews
Sivar writes "After a long hiatus while setting up their new testbed, StorageReview.com has released a number of reviews of the latest hard drives, including Hitachi's Deskstar 7K500 which now occupies the top performance spot for desktop drives, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 which is the first shipping Serial ATA-II drive, the Seagate NL35 for backup servers and other "nearline" storage, and the Western Digital WD4000YR, which interestingly is actually based on their famous (and expensive) Raptor unit." Hitachi's SATA-II drive was also recently reviewed by BigBruin in case you missed it.
I really REALLY want a dependable, long-lasting, fast and ample-capacity RAM drive. No more spinning platters please.
Meh.
look at hiatchi laptop drives like the ones out of IBM (now lenovo *shudder*) laptops. You may find all those attirbutes you seek there.
XML - A clever joke would be here if
With over half the PC's sold being laptops and nearly all laptops' RAM and HD being just as user replace/upgradable as any desktop, reviewers should really give the laptop world some love.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I administered several of them at a previous job. They're not your typical desktop PC, but they're certainly not 1970s mainframes either.
You obviously do not understand the strength of wood. A properly built server rack can easily handle a 54 kg system. Even the pre-fabricated wooden racks from your typical hardware store are more than sufficient. You can reinforce one of those, if you really feel it to be necessary.
Don't forget that houses are often built from wood. It's a very versatile and strong construction material.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I want a solid state drive; sick of mechanical breakdowns and especially the noise.
If you want to pay 100x more per GB of storage, go right on ahead, I won't stop you, but I won't follow your trail either until the cost difference is a lot lower. Even with buying a second set of drives for off-line backup, mechanical drives are still a far better deal for mass storage.
Frankly, I've had not much of either failures or noise in the past five years, unless you are talking 8+ year old drives, but by then they are too small or slow to be useful anyway.
You could simply switch to a quieter drive, like some Samsungs or Seagates, any good drive review site should show relevant noise measurements. I've found some treatments to make very quiet even quieter by gluing sheets of accoustical foam to various parts inside a computer case that might resonate or reflect sound.
Well, I'm somewhat inclined to agree with you. Though I never expected a lot from Samsung, my parents have one of their older IDE drives in their machine to this day that still performs just fine - at least 6 or 7 years now. Only problem now is, it just doesn't have enough capacity for modern OS's and software.
Meanwhile, I was always a traditional supporter of both WD and Maxtor (because frankly, I used a lot of Seagates and always had crashes/failures with 'em), but the warranty situation today is CRAP!
1 year only on any new retail-boxed Maxtor drive?? 1 year only on any WD drive that's not labeled a "special edition"? What's so "special" about a decent quality of build??
My 250GB SATA Maxtor DiamondMax drive just died on me, only 3 months past the 1 year warranty - and I'm now counting the days before the second one of mine does the same - since I bought both from the same place, at the same time - and both have the same manufacture date stamped on them.
I actually went back to buying Seagate for my newer SATA drives, because they're backing them with a 5 year warranty. It seems like the rules of "who is good, and who is junk" have changed around in recent years - so we'll see. If not, then at least Seagate will be swapping my drives out for free for me every so often over the next 4 or 5 years.
I agree. I bought some Samsung 160GB 5400RPM drives back when they were being phased out. Cool, quiet, reliable - great drives.
I think it's time for the Quantum Bigfoot drives to make a comeback. With today's technology, I'm sure we could easily have a 1TB drive with 5.25" platters. I'd buy one. I wouldn't really care about speed or latency issues, as I would certainly have a fast 3.5" drive to boot the OS off of.
Disclaimer: I have previously purchased hard drives for a living. This is based directly on personal experience. Your personal experience, for reasons I will explain below, may well differ.
Bad drives, from all manufacturers, come in batches. A batch will either be Dead on Arrival (DoA), Dead About A Week After Arrival (faulty), Dead After About A Month (flaky), or absolutely fine (good).
The batches are highly localised to supplier/region/manufacturer, and one drive in a batch is fairly representative of the batch; if one drive is bad, view the whole crate with suspicion. If you get stuff too far down the supply chain to get them batch-by-batch, then you'll just have to cross your fingers.
For example: Joe might have never had any problems with Maxtor, and will swear by them, but every Western Digital he's ever had dies in the first week. Until he switches supplier, or moves. Now, suddenly, he gets three consecutive bad batches of Maxtors, but the Western Digitals are fine. Paul, on the other hand, in another country, swears by Seagate, so Joe tries Seagate, and the whole crate of drives arrives DoA even though they're normally fine.
Point is this: Bad drives come in groups, no manufacturer is immune to them, and no manufacturer is really better than any other overall (but supplies in your country, or to your supplier, may tell a very different story than the overall supply).
Fast drives are slightly less reliable than slow drives, but fast drives are also manufactured to tighter tolerances. It roughly balances out, but heat is more of an issue with fast drives. Moreso with 15K ones. The Raptors seem to be an excellent sweet spot for a desktop drive.
Hot drives die quicker. Drives with more platters run hotter. Drives with no airflow past them run hotter again. Drives with no airflow past them at the top of a stack with no airflow past them will die no matter what. Drives which are faulty, will die prematurely, regardless of all the above. With a burn-in, you might be able to tell DoA and faulty drives apart from the others, but it's almost impossible to determine which ones are flaky and which ones are good. Your best bet is to look at the SMART data; but on at least half of flaky drives, they won't show the tiniest bit of problem until right before they die catastrophically.
Excepting extreme outliers like the Deathstars, wihch were doomed from the very beginning (and those were, I'm afraid, only the GXPs; modern Hitachi Deskstars like the popular 7K400 and the high-capacity 7K500 are actually surprisingly good in the reliability stakes, given the 7K500 does run hot so needs airflow), that's pretty much it.
Don't get cheap NAS units (RAID arrays in a box) or RAID controllers. Either 3ware or Adaptec, never Promise, Highpoint or VIA. Cheap RAID controllers die more often than RAID arrays. Software RAID is far more reliable than cheap hardware RAID.
RMA varies between manufacturers... and regions, so I can't give you useful advice here, except that RMA policy is more important than warranty in many situations. Don't forget that some suppliers offer better RMA policies direct than the manufacturers; but some, very much the other way around.
Manufacturers' general traits (your experiences may differ): Maxtors click when seeking and run hot, and click more and whine when they are about to die. WDs don't click when seeking and don't whine, and also run fairly cool. Hitachis are fast at random seeking for their class, and come in larger capacities (7K500). Seagates are slower, and a bit clicky and whiny, but some people have better reliability with them (as above, some people have worse, it's luck). Samsung Spinpoints are slow, but the quietest.
And remember: All drives die. It's just a matter of treating them right, and beyond that, just luck, and time.