[ale] Do all new large SATA drives suck?

[Lightner, Jeff]

We have a disk array that has had 24 x 2 TB disks since Nov 2010.  I think in that time we’ve had to replace 1.   We just added another 8 of these earlier this year.

The main “suck” of large SATA is they are often much slower (e.g. 7200 RPM) than smaller SAS drives that are available.






________________________________
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jeff Hubbs
Sent: Friday, March 02, 2012 11:28 AM
To: neal at mnopltd.com; Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Do all new large SATA drives suck?

Consider that the vast majority of people buy and use those drives without incident and never think to put a review saying so on any one particular vendor site.

On 3/2/12 11:18 AM, Neal Rhodes wrote:
I've gone ahead and ordered an HP core i3 system to be our next Centos home/office server.

It's  got a 1.5TB drive; normally on these off-lease units I'd buy two brand new drives and mirror them.  Or that's what we've done with the last 3 linux servers.     All of which are still technically functioning since Fedora core 1.

This drive is likely about a year old, so I'm thinking I'll just buy a new 1.5TB drive and install Centos to mirror the primary.

When I look at the crop of 1 - 1.5TB drives on TigerDirect and read the reviews, they seem to be uniformly terrible - DOA,  failed after 3 weeks, replacement failed after a week, etc.  Seagate seems to be the worst, although WD not too far behind.

Ummm, isn't one of the primary selling features of a disk drive that it's not supposed to blow up and take down all your data with it?    Has there been a massive quality slip in the last couple years since I last bought drives?    Seriously -  I can lose a power supply, a motherboard, a display - you name it, and once I replace it I can expect to still have the data.    Yes, I should do backups, and I do, and yes, I should mirror the drives, and I do.    I should do SMARTD monitoring and I do.  But isn't this like selling tires that tend to shred randomly?    Isn't not blowing up catastrophically with no warning beforehand a basic selling point for disk drives?    What's the point of mirroring if the odds are good that both drives will fail completely the same week?   What's the point of SMARTD monitoring if the darn drive quits without warning?

Does anybody make a decent drive in that size range?

I'm thinking that not even considering economy,  my old theory of buying a pair of new identical drives may not be wise anymore, and sticking with one drive that has lasted over a year and one new drive is a better plan.

Thoughts?

Neal



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