[ale] Which large capacity drives are you having the best luck with?

[Ron Frazier]

Ryan,

I realize it's after Christmas, but I just saw this.  I don't have any
1.5 TB or 2 TB drives yet.  However, I've always liked the Seagate brand
and have had good performance and reliability with them.  They also have
a 5 year warranty.  I have a couple of 1 TB Seagate drives in my desktop
box that I built and they seem to do fine.  I also have a Hitachi 500 GB
drive that works well also.

No matter what you buy, I would get a copy of Spinrite ( $ 90 )
( http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm ).  This is one of the world's most
advanced disk drive analysis and recovery programs.  The installer is a
Windows program, but once you run that, you can create a bootable CD
image which boots on it's own and has it's own clone of DOS.  It has to
run own its own without the normal OS running.

This will allow you to run an exhaustive read, invert, write, read,
invert, write analysis on the drive.  Now, while you don't need to
recover data on a new drive, this reads and writes every bit in every
sector twice (to 1 and 0), and forces the drive's firmware to make a
very thorough analysis of what's good and what's not and map out any bad
areas.  I do this to ALL new drives I get, and all new computers (it's
non destructive).  (Actually, on new drives, I run one sweep of a drive
wipe program to put random data on the drive, rather than having all 1's
or 0's.  Then I run Spinrite.)  I also try to run Spinrite on each drive
2 - 3 times per year.  Doing this over time reads weak sectors while
they're still readable and maps them out if they're getting flaky.  If
you do this, barring mechanical, power, or controller problems, you can
keep a drive functioning flawlessly for many years.

The creator of Spinrite is an expert on computer security.  He has an
excellent podcast on the topic at the address below.  Also, on almost
every show, he cites an example of a testimonial of a dying drive that
has been recovered by this software.  I really think it's worth a look.
I have no financial interest in the product, but am a happy user.

http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm
http://www.twit.tv/sn

If you decide to get and use the product, I'll be glad to explain how to
run it.  On drives of the size you're talking about, expect the
procedure to take about 48 hours to run.  However, it can be stopped and
resumed.

Sincerely,

Ron

On Tue, 2010-12-21 at 22:39 -0500, Matty wrote:
> I want to play around with openfiler and freenas over Xmas, and I've
> been reading tons of 1.5TB and 2TB disk drive reviews tonight. From
> what I've gathered so far, the reliability of large capacity drives
> sucks and you need to factor this in when picking your RAID levels
> (I'm going with RAID6). Amazon currently has 1.5TB drives for $60:
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002ZCXJZE?ie=UTF8&tag=tp6708-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002ZCXJZE"
> 
> So I'm thinking about picking up a few of these for my project. Anyone
> have any thoughts on these drives or any of the other 1.5TB - 2TB
> drive manufacturers? Trying to find something that performs reasonably
> well and is relatively reliable.
> 
> Thanks for any feedback,
> - Ryan
> --
> http://prefetch.net

-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
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Ron Frazier

770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT c3energy.com