Re: Hard drive Reliability?

["Måns Rullgård" <mru@kth.se>]

John Lange <john.lange@bighostbox.com> writes:

> I have a few discussions recently with technical service people and we
> all come to the conclusion that Hard Drives are far less reliable than
> they used to be.
>
> Case in point, I have a 120G Maxtor drive in a server that began to fail
> less than 8 months into service. Major headache.
>
> I've heard similar stories from other people. I guy I know that sells
> both desktop and file server systems now says he now only builds
> motherboards with some kind of RAID 1 and dual drives because drives
> fail so often this saves loads of headaches. After a their system has
> died and they 'lost everything' people are more than willing to pay the
> extra $150 for redundancy.
>
> I know drive manufactures were sued recently in a class action for
> shipping drives which they knew were going to fail prematurely but that
> was a few years back.
>
> So what are other peoples feelings about drive reliability and are some
> brands better than others?

I'd agree that drives are not as good as they used to be.  I recently
had a one year old Western Digital disk suddenly drop dead while
running.  Nothing could be recovered from it.  Shortly after that I
bought four Seagate Barracuda ATA disks, one of which was defective.
It would work flawlessly for an hour to a month, then shut itself
down.  Rebooting made it run for a while before it repeated.

Compare this to the 1GB Quantum Fireball SCSI disk sitting in my
firewall.  It's been running 24/7 since some time around 1996.

> Does anyone know of any web sites with statistics or test data?

That would be interesting.

-- 
Måns Rullgård
mru@kth.se

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