[ale] The perpetual question: best current HDD?

[Jim Kinney]

best is whatever you DON'T have unless someone else paid for what you DO
have. :-)

Seriously, enterprise drives are better than home use drives. Within each
classification, the differences between drives are negligible over their
lifespan. warranties are a good indicator of how well a drive tested out at
the manufacturers facility but not a good indicator of how it will work in
your gear with your loading, cooling, vibrations and power.

Newer drives (i.e. higher capacity) seem to be more sensitive to
temperature than drives from 5 years ago. SAS drives seems to be able to
take temps than would melt most cheeses.

In short: how much money do you have? It's often easier to build a RAID10
and have a spare pair for cheaper than buying a pile of expensive drives
with longer warranty. Many people have drives that are 10 years old and
doing fine.

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
>
> --
>        Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>        Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>        URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>        warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
*
*Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain
at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.
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- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain
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