[ale] The perpetual question: best current HDD?

[Greg Clifton]

 See this link:
http://www.newegg.com/Special/ShellShocker.aspx?cm_sp=ShellShocker-_-9SIA06V000LUJ1-_-01062013_3

Folks, let's have realistic expectations here, in an era when you can get a
4TB External HDD for $170, don't expect to see 5 year warranties. Esp. when
you are buying from discounters that often get cheaper prices by reducing
the length of the warranty. Does that mean that the 1yr. warranty drive is
less reliable than a 5yr. warranty drive, I seriously doubt it. In my view,
you are just prepaying for the replacement drive that you are ultimately
going to need and the replacement will be a refurbished drive anyway.

With nearly 25 years experience in the hardware business, I can tell you
that hard drives are MUCH more reliable than they were years ago. Does that
mean they no longer fail, of course not (to borrow an analogy from bird
hunting "if it flies, it dies"), but with SMART and such, you are much more
likely to be made aware of a pending failure than with early generation
drives. The real value is in the data contained on the hard drive, not the
hardware itself. So my advice is to just buy some spares and be diligent
with your backups (like few of us are).

Yes, we are down to three brands of HDDs now:
Seagate bought Samsung HDD business
WD bought Hitachi HDD business
Toshiba and Fujitsu, are "joined at the hip" too, IIRC.

I think they are probably all darn good these days, but at least in the
past (8-10 years back) WD drives had more efficient firmware than Seagate
drives so that a similar sized drive with the same spindle speed had
greater throughput if it was WD than Seagate. What might impact things more
these days is the amount of cache on the drive (typically 32 or 64 GB now
vs 8 or 16 a few years back). In a small RAID array, I doubt if the 6gb/s
vs 3gb/s will have a big impact. I think you would only obtain 6gb/s as a
brief burst from the cache and could only sustain it with many spindles in
a rather large array.

Anyway, them's my thoughts.
Greg Clifton






On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 1:16 PM, Brian Mathis <
brian.mathis+ale at betteradmin.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 11:20 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
> > Hey all,
> >
> > I'm looking to replace some 1TB HDDs in a s/w RAID-10 array with some
> > 2TB models.  The existing drives have been running flawlessly for a few
> > years, so they are due to get swapped out anyways.  I did have one disk
> > fail a year or so ago so it was swapped out, and I bought a cold spare
> > at the same time so I have one more spare (of the same type/model as the
> > replacement drive).  So I'm looking for another pair of drives that I
> > can use as the mirrors (so each mirror has one of type/batch-A and one
> > of the yet-to-be-bought set of drives).
> >
> > Of course, when I bought the drives warranties were 3 or 5 years, not
> > the '1 or 2' years they are now.  So I'm looking for the "best value"
> > 2TB drives available today -- lowest price for highest quality + good
> > warranty.  It looks like I can pretty much only choose between WD and
> > Seagate nowadays -- I guess lots of consolidation in the market?  (My
> > existing drives were Hitachi, which in my experience were always great
> > drives).
> >
> > What's the current going theories and best practices?  Any concrete
> > suggestions (links to NewEgg or some other vendor would be appreciated).
> >
> >
> > Thanks,
> > -derek
>
>
> Check the storagereview.com leaderboard
> (http://www.storagereview.com/best_drives) for recommendations on
> their best drives for each category.  They are impartial and do a lot
> of reviews.
>
> Many people will swear by one brand or another, but that is mostly
> anecdotal and thus meaningless.
>
>
> ❧ Brian Mathis
>
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