[ale] Do all new large SATA drives suck?

[Jeff Hubbs]

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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