[ale] Do all new large SATA drives suck?

[Pat Regan]

On Fri, 2 Mar 2012 14:33:37 -0500
gcs8 <gcsviii at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am squatting on 7+TB of data, but I would say buying drives atm is
> going to be hit or miss, think the plant that makes the spindle
> motors is not full of water any more, but everything I have read says
> ~q3 of this year things will start getting back to normal.

Google has a paper on this subject.  They say about 1-2% of their
drives fail in the first year and 8-9% fail by their third year of
operation.  Their failure rates are the same between manufacturers.  If
I remember correctly, too, SAS drives don't hold up any better than
SATA, either.

I think I pipe up every time this sort of discussion comes up.  Even
just at home, I buy quite a large number of drives and I have plenty of
failures here.  I assume every drive I buy will die prematurely so I
try to buy based on the manufacturers RMA policy.  :)

I only had one bad Maxtor drive, and it was the only one I remember
owning.  It was a 160 gig connected to a 3ware RAID card.  They
wouldn't take the drive back unless I ran their MaxBlast software and
got some sort of code out of it.  To do that, I had to move the drive
off of the RAID card...  MaxBlast claimed to "repair" the drive and
said it was now fine.  That happened three times...

My favorite RMA process is Western Digital's.  They'll ship the drive
out immediately, and for free, as long as you give them your credit
card data.  Everyone else seems to want to charge for this.  I like
doing this because I never have good hard drive packaging laying
around.  It helps that they'll send me some for free :)

Pat