3 ms·
My experience, over decades, but now coming up on half that ago, was that IBM/Hitachi/HGST are definitely worth it. I used to run a small hosting business, whi
by linsomniac 8y ago
My experience, over decades, but now coming up on half that ago, was that IBM/Hitachi/HGST are definitely worth it. I used to run a small hosting business, which had hundreds of discs, and consulting business which had clients with hundreds more discs.
Seagates, in general, could always be expected to fail in a 3 year span. Often multiple times. IBM/Hitachi/HGST, especially the UltraStar enterprise line, would basically never fail. Over 20 years and hundreds of discs concurrently running (switching out as opportunity arose), we probably RMAed single digits of HGST drives.
In comparison, while I had a few pockets of Seagate drives that didn't fail (I had 6 in a storage server at home that never gave me problems), we could generally expect 5% of Seagate drives that we had running to fail in a given year. Enterprise or regular didn't really seem to matter.
For us, replacing a drive was fairly expensive, using a limited resource (our time). So we gravitated to HGST almost exclusively.
But: We also did an extensive burn-in process before a drive went into production. Basically: "badblocks -svw" for a week. He noticed that we had some drives that would fall out of RAID arrays, but if we ran badblocks on would never report an error. My theory was that there were some marginal sectors that would bit-rot. Running a week of badblocks would exercise those and allow badblock remapping to remove them from use.
Remember the IBM "Deathstar" 75GXP? We even had good luck with those. I had one of them start freaking out, and I was aware of the "Deathstar" name, so I went to replace it with another drive I had on hand. When I pulled it out to replace it I realized it was HOT. Not in the grand scheme of things, but definitely hot to the touch. I looked up the temp specs and it was clearly above that. The box it was in had 2 5-inch bays that didn't have the covers on them. I covered those bays, turned the machine back on after re-installing the Deathstar, and the drive continued operating for another 3-5 years with no problem. Made me wonder if improper cooling was the source of those reports.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago> improper cooling You've had far more experience with this stuff than I have. I wonder what your view is on all these NAS RAID boxes and HDD longevity and heat. I personally never saw so many HDD failures until I started running them inside a small NAS I bought some years ago. I nicknamed it my "drive killer" because I was replacing the things so often. Other HDDs I have in other (non-NAS) machines sure seemed to last much longer. As for the Deathstar story: I had a similar experience with a Seagate. Inside the NAS, one of the SMART error counts started to rise in a foreboding way, so I replaced it (with an HGST) before it had a chance to die. Then, out of curiosity, I tried the old Seagate in a different non-critical setting (non-NAS) and it's continued to work for two more years. IDK. Too much heat?
- XorNot 8y agoAFAIK Google have said they never really find any correlation between SMART errors and actual drive failures.
- HillaryBriss 8y agoInteresting. Have not heard that before. My anecdotal experience in that NAS enclosure with Seagate drives was that when, IIRC, "Reallocated Sector Count" started to go up week after week, the drive would fail within a few months.
- saltcured 8y agoIt's not impossible to have a drive appear unreliable in one machine and reliable in another (if you physically move it). There could be something electrically or mechanically wrong with the machine which causes a particular drive to malfunction more frequently. If you see this repeatedly with one machine, I would definitely consider that it is the machine which is bad rather than the drives. A power supply may be insufficient to support the peak requirements of the drives, for example. A poor mounting structure might resonate or transfer vibration or shock into one or more drive slots from the environment.
- HillaryBriss 8y agothanks for that interesting note. i had been thinking only about heat as a cause of trouble in that enclosure (an old Netgear ReadyNas).
- lathiat 8y agoVibrations can be problematic in multi drive chassis. The more NAS rated drives are apparently rated specifically to deal better with vibrations and of course the NAS itself some isolate drives far better than others from each other. It might seem minor, but just watch this rather old now but infamous video of Brendan Gregg shouting at HDDs causing significant drops in throughput: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
- kalleboo 8y agoThe Deathstar 75GXP issues were [quote Wikipedia] "due to the magnetic coating soon beginning to loosen and sprinkle off from the platters, creating dust in the hard disk array and leading to crashes over large areas of the platters". Perhaps heat could have accelerated the process by loosening the material somehow, but it was definitely a design/manufacturing flaw.