From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Brad Campbell Subject: Re: good drive / bad drive (maxtor topic) Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2004 10:16:53 +0400 Message-ID: <41A96D55.9090205@wasp.net.au> References: <200411271806.iARI6SN24012@www.watkins-home.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <200411271806.iARI6SN24012@www.watkins-home.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Guy Cc: 'Mark Klarzynski' , linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Guy wrote: > It would be handy if someone would do an extended test of all of the disk > drives. Consumer Reports does this type of thing all the time, just not on > disk drives. I don't think they do any extended tests on any computer > hardware. The testing should continue for 5 years. And it could be mostly > automated. No user interaction unless something goes wrong. Now we need > someone with money! :) > Problem with this is by the time the test has any sort of meaningful data, the drives have been obsoleted/EOL'd. For the record I have 12 Maxtor Maxline-II 250GB drives here which have 200 days on the clock and nary a hiccup. I don't doubt people have trouble with Maxtor drives, hell prior to the release of the Maxline-II drives I would not have looked at them sideways, too many previous bad experiences. Having said that, I have had just as many Seagate drives fail and I won't touch them either. I had a bad run with WD and the dodgy firmware that failed when used in a RAID, and I have had a couple of them fail recently. The only drives I have had long enough to consider a good sample were Quantum Fireballs, and I ran those for 5 years with no failures. A friend of mine, however was not so lucky and had a huge failure rate with them. Besides the IBM deathstar fiasco I really believe there appears to be little rhyme or reason to patterns of failure. Bad batches, lousy operating conditions, different usage patterns, bad wholesaler/transport handling will all play a part. I'm just crossing my fingers and making sure the drives are well cooled, have minimised temperature cycling (not shutting the box down unless I have to) and are well monitored. I'm about to purchase another 25 Maxline-II's so that might help with the sample distribution. (At least Maxtor have a decent RMA process, WD's internation RMA process sucks) -- Brad /"\ Save the Forests \ / ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN Burn a Greenie. X AGAINST HTML MAIL / \