OT: Disk choices

Hi,

Two of the projects I am working on require metric buttloads of secondary storage. Some for online use, even more for offline/archival purposes.

I've been using external USB drives so far. Buying more of these just doesn't *feel* right (why am I buying cases, controllers, power supplies etc. when I just need the *drives*?)

So, I'm in the market for some 1-2T drives, SATA no doubt. I don't need speed demons. Rather, I would like something that is going to be reliable, and probably run cool (this makes choice of enclosure less of an issue).

But, I've not bought "components" like this in quite some time. So, I'm looking for the

25c tour re: current technology as well as recommendations (pro/con) re: vendors, models, etc.

(sigh) I realize this is going to be one of those highly SUBJECTIVE issues with varying opinions and personal experiences. As such, I don't expect a "right" answer -- just trying to get a feel for where I should be looking. (e.g., if everyone started moaning about Blinkenlite XJT200's I would probably go looking to see why it was such a *dog*!)

Thanks,

--don

Reply to
D Yuniskis
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There's effectively only three manufacturers. According to my friend in the video industry, the PVR is one of the main driving forces behind capacity and reliability, since many PVRs record continuously, sometimes two channels, while sometimes playing as well - very hard on drives. His opinion is that the manufacturers are leap- frogging one another every month or three, so which is best depends on where you buy in the cycle.

That said, I like WD, and wouldn't have bought Seagate again after a bad support/warrantee experience, except last time, a laptop drive, was so much cheaper that I went with them. I don't know where Hitachi are wrt these two.

If you want reliability, buy server-grade drives. They cost ~20% more, but have an MTBF a couple of orders of magnitude higher.

Clifford Heath.

Reply to
Clifford Heath

The short answer to this is: you don't rely on "a" drive, you buy at least two redundant storage arrays from different manufacturers. I had years of good service out of Seagate drives. Then I bought a 1.5TB drive that failed within weeks, and after Googling the model# found out that there were hundreds of others with the same issue, and a product recall from Seagate.

Model A,B,C,D,E,F can be fine. Model G has a firmware bug, or someone forgot to do a Monte Carlo on the resistor values in it, and it becomes unreliable. Past history does NOT guarantee future performance.

Reply to
larwe

WD, Seacrate and the Deathstars?

I'll admit to being out-of-the-(consumer-)loop but I thought most PVR's used ~80G drives? (at least the ones I have torn apart)

I'm not really concerned about "best" as an absolute. Rather, trying to avoid *dogs*.

I have an assortment of WD and Seagate drives. I will admit that the criteria for buying each have been inconsistent. The last two external Seagates that I purchased "had issues" -- very long access times, "clicking", etc. So, they went right back to the store ("No, I don't care how good the warranty is... I don't want to go through the trouble of having to replace them *later*!")

OTOH, I have a pair of 1.5T Seagates that have worked well.

As have the WD's.

[I really should consolidate all these but each system has its own hardware requirements, etc.]

The only failed drives I have encountered have been Deathstars -- all in laptops (a bit more brutal of an environment?). And, to be fair, I have no idea if the laptops that have NOT had failed drives weren't ALSO deathstars (i.e., maybe Hitachi has a bigger share of the laptop market?).

I guess I'm asking what sort of reliability people have experienced with these larger drives. None of my workstations have TB drives -- I think each of them have ~500G (typically spread over several spindles). The SB1000 I think only has ~40G internally.

Even my arrays use small-ish drives :-/ Having that much on a single spindle is a mixture of scary and insane! :>

Reply to
D Yuniskis

Actually, I have found that to be unnecessary. I've converted all my arrays to JBOD's as the reliability of drives *seems* to be good enough (kept cool and not spinning needlessly) to not require that redundancy. I retired a 4T array a while back because it was just too much power/noise for too little "added reliability" -- 24 160G drives in a 3U case (I had it configured as a 3T RAID50 -- "reliability + speed"; as a RAID0/1 it was a bottomless pipe :> ).

I've found that it is less work to just alternate drives. If

*a* drive fails, you lose the most recent "whatever". But, the "whatever" before that is still available. This also gives you some protection against foot-shooting! [I don't keep drives spinning unless they are in use]
Reply to
D Yuniskis

What he said. Exactly.

I've been known to buy Seagate for temporary bulk storage, but won't trust anything but WD in my servers. YMMV.

Reply to
Jim Stewart

Hmmm... I've got an assortment of drives in my servers (Compaq/Fujitsu, Maxtor/Seagate, WD, IBM/Hitachi, etc.) and have had good luck with all of them. Though none are SATA/PATA drives (FC, SCA, SCSI, etc.). Older and smaller than what you would find today -- but I think that probably works *against* them (power dissipation being higher/hotter).

And, of course, the environment in the server boxes is much more conducive to long(er) life...

OTOH, these external USB/FW drives look like bedwarmers!

So, what's the deal with WD's "color scheme" (blue, black, green, pink-polka-dotted, etc.)?

Reply to
D Yuniskis

That was my first thought. I assume we're talking about consumer grade drives rather than enterprise units. I've installed a few Hitachi Cinemastar drives here, mainly for their acoustic properties and quoted reliabilty - the MTBF is in excess of 100 years but I'm not 100% sure I actually believe that. Performance is reasonable on balance - it seems with AV drives you lose a little in terms of access time but you gain in terms of true sustained transfer rates

- you can read and write tens of gigbytes without them so much as burping. The drives I've installed here are 500GB units but no doubt they have bigger models in their range.

--
Andrew Smallshaw
andrews@sdf.lonestar.org
Reply to
Andrew Smallshaw

Rather than take a statistically useless poll from usenet can I suggest you type "google drive reliability" into google. You will be surprised at how open google, the biggest user of drives in the world, are. I was in the drive test business a while back (as in testing circa a million drives a year). It all boils down to :- Enterprise drives are not inherently more reliable, they just tend to get cooled better and use lower magnetic densities on otherwise identical mechanicals. The failure rate is not a bathtub. After infant mortality the probability of failure is constant. The older it is the more times you have rolled the dice.

Colin

Reply to
colin_toogood

Perhaps I am a bit naive but I think "the biggest user of drives in the world" is *probably* treated considerably differently in terms of pricing, support and return/repair policy than a guy looking to buy half a dozen drives. :>

As such, I suspec the "statistically useless poll from USENET" will likely yield more *practical* information to (hopefully) help me avoid "buying lemons".

While my cold aisle is probably around the same temperature as that in googles "container" data centers, I don't spend the resources that they do (nor the manpower). I also suspect my usage patterns would be more in tune with those of folks here than a firm whose drives are hammered on 24/7/365.

I suspect there is a difference between drives run continuously vs. drives spun up and down repeatedly.

Reply to
D Yuniskis

Not a valid assumption. :> I'm just looking for advice as to what to look *at* and what to *avoid*. Though, when these projects are finished, I'll probably take them off-line and just use them for archival storage.

I think AV drives omit some of the periodic recalibration cycles at run time.

My use is for data storage so, "in a tie", access time would be the winner there (though neither of these apps really beat on the drive).

At 500G you could still be talking PATA -- though I suspect not. (extra credit question: anyone know where the PATA cutoff was?)

Reply to
D Yuniskis

If you need some degree of reliability with current consumer quality electronics (i.e. you are not willing to pay for military/aerospace components), I would suggest looking for various redundancy options to keep the _system_ reliability at a reasonable level.

For disk storage, create some kind of RAID array and use similar disks from various manufacturers. If some batch from some manufacturer shows a higher failure rate than normal, use replacement parts from other manufacturers.

The rapid drop in electronics cost makes it possible to use redundant systems, unfortunately, the general drop in reliability, makes it more or less mandatory to use redundant systems for 24x7 operations :-).

Reply to
Paul Keinanen

My concerns are currently only for development use. I.e., I keep *many* different images of the system on a drive so I can rollback changes easily (as well as documenting test history). E.g., I can easily add 20G in a work session, often considerably more. I don't want to have to think about what I *should* be preserving vs. what I should roll back, etc. The same attitude extends to not having to worry about a premature failure (especially something that would plague a particular "model number" of drive).

Yes. The problem is *predicting* which of those manufacturers, models, etc. will be the "problems"... (this is one reason why I opt for lots of smaller drives on my workstations -- easier to backup and less to risk losing on a single spindle).

Reply to
D Yuniskis

That assumption was based on the capacity you're after. Genuine enterprise drives simply don't go that big - the Savvios and the like all seem to currently top out at 600GB. I assume world+dog is using consumer grade drives and RAID setups for bulk storage, and keeping the pricey stuff for where there is no alternative.

Those are SATA-II drives. IDE drives cerrtianly go up to 500GB - I have a couple here that size from Maxtor and WD. 750GB are also available from multiple manufacturers. A little Googling found the 1000HDGI3I-TM, a 1TB drive from Total Micro Technologies. Can't say I've ever heard of them, but usually when I say that about a company someone is amazed that I've somehow managed to miss them. My reading suggests it is the only IDE drive that size.

--
Andrew Smallshaw
andrews@sdf.lonestar.org
Reply to
Andrew Smallshaw

LBA mode initially supported for 28 bit sector numbers, 32G accordingly. That was further extended to 48 bits, i.e. 32KT.

Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

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Reply to
Vladimir Vassilevsky

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