Buying a Harddrive??

Then it's probably better to buy it sooner rather than later. I'd expect prices to rise and production to be cut…

http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/miscellaneous/thailand-floods-to-significant-impact-wd

Western Digital are shit anyway.

+1

Seagate goflex 3tb ftw

WD are the best! Fuck Seagate. Never getting another one of those again.

3Tb 4K Sector drives are a nightmare at the moment with Server OS's. Tis going to be a while before the industry fully transitions.

I've handled literally thousands of hard drives. Barring certain notable exceptions like IBM's "Deathstar" drives, or the godawful mess that was Seagate's Bigfoot drives back in the 1.2gb - 4.3gb days, because EVERYONE occasionally pumps out some lemons, all drive manufacturers are pretty much equal.

10 years ago, I wouldn't touch WD drives with someone elses 10ft barge pole. Because for a time, they made shit. For a time, Seagate made shit, and I wouldn't touch them. Currently, everyone is about the same and I just get whatever is good value on the day I'm buying.


Biggest killers of modern drives:
1: Using them in external enclosures. No matter how careful you are, they eventually get knocked around enough. Obviously 2.5" laptop drives are a bit better protected than 3.5" desktop drives, but they also tend to get knocked around more too.
2: Heat. On hot summer days, sometimes drives in my home server go into thermal shutdown, too much of that kills them. This also applies to badly designed external enclosures too.

Oh yeah? What are you seeing? *Relevant to the interests of one who runs Server OS at home*

Volume Snap Shot Issues mainly. Which occur purely if the HDD is plugged in. It doesn't even have to be used for anything.

I might be being melodramatic, but its a nightmare in my world

GL with the new 4tb ones then

WD caviar green drives FAIL


too much of the in out in out

"green" hardrives are usually shithouse in my experience.

Heh, never had major problems with hard drives (touches wood), you can usually tell when one is failing and you just get as much off as you can before it dies.

Always get told to RAID but don't really see the point in cost/benefit.

Actually with the Seagate Goflex drives its more the hardware interface, which emulates 4K sectors regardless of the size of the drive attached.

Funky. Wonder if there is similar issues on 7 since VSS stuff is used there too, hidden away from prying eyes.

Hourly backups to home RAID1 NAS box = never have to worry about shit until there's a fire :p

Got a few WD Green drives, no complain of product, in fact they seem to deal with the heat better in my use case. Sure, they aren't particularly flash performers, but I'm only using them for bulk media storage, so no dramas there.

Always remember, RAID isn't backup.

Correct. But the NAS is backing up my computers. That part's backup

The WD mybook enclosures are brilliant. passive cooling that works. The WD Green drives are good too, I must have about 10 1, 1.5 and 2tb drives around the place and not had a problem.

Well my 1tb crashed in less than two years and on googling it found heaps of others had similar issue.

lots of people have problems - the more you sell the more numbers of people will have an issue.

http://serverfault.com/questions/7952/what-brands-of-hard-disk-has-the-lowest-failure-rates

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/who-makes-the-best-hard-drives/159

smallish sample size

I was referring to particular product made by WD since that 07 zdnet article was published. Really only 2 players in the hdd market now right?

lol no. there's all those listed and more.

Check again

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Manufacturers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers

How does 5 = 2?

Also pardon me for not keeping up with the minutiae of acquisitions and mergers.

All I know is around my desk I can see disks from about 6 different manufacturers, and that's not even cracking any machines open

I one bought an iPhone and it broke within 24 hours. Clearly all iphones are going to fail.

Or something. Theres a note from googles own analysis of its data centers that it is particular models (from different manufactures) that have high failure rates or not, rather than makes. Also, up to a point heat doesnt have much of an effect on failure rates, too cold can as can rapid changes.

Yeah that's what I was getting at with my initial post - certain models rather than ranges.


If I recall, the heat thing was "within specified operating range". If you're continually pushing drives over the max operating temp (at which point modem drives will often shutdown anyway), then you start seeing failures.

Google has some insane data on that kind of thing thanks to their custom build commodity hardware server model.

They used to think higher temp = higher failure in a linear progression kind of way but that is not the case - its pretty standard till you get over a certain number, which was higher than they previously thought.

if you're not Level 8 in M+A then WAYSA