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The hard disk drive quality has dropped over the last few years. * Most consumer drives over 2TB have extremely poor reliability. Just check any Amazon or Newe

The hard disk drive quality has dropped over the last few years. * Most consumer drives over 2TB have extremely poor reliability. Just check any Amazon or Newegg review (DOA and early mortality show up with more frequency). Yes, I know using reviews are not accurate but since there is no public information of drive failure rates there is not really much to go on. * The reduction of manufacturer warranty since Thailand floods. Surprise, they never changed it back to the original 3 year warranty. If you have a large array of disks, there is nothing to really to worry about. If you have a small set of drives, spend a little extra and get the "Black" or RE drives with 5 year warranty. Avoid any "Green" drive.

JoeAltmaier 13y ago
I have to suspect its because bleeding-edge drives have to be over-rated to compete. They have better margins which should mean they could afford better quality. But they can barely make the drive at all; they want to ship before reliability is quite there; so top-end drives are sketchy.
xeroxmalf 13y ago
The RED drives you are refering to actually have some of the worst reviews around compared to even normal consumer drives. (Source: newegg reviews you mentioned)
- leeoniya 13y ago
  i'm not sure where you're getting that info: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236343 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236... http://www.amazon.com/WD-Red-NAS-Hard-Drive/dp/B008JJLZ7G http://www.amazon.com/WD-Red-NAS-Hard-Drive/dp/B008JJLZ7G been running 3x of these in a raid-5 NAS, no issues so far (not that it's any kind of indicator on a system which idles as a backup all day)
  - sp332 13y ago
    About half of the Newegg reviews are 3-eggs or lower. And even some of the 5-egg reviews mention dead drives! They only got 5 eggs because of Newegg's easy return policy. The drives are clearly unreliable.
    - leeoniya 13y ago
      great :(
pedrocr 13y ago
Why avoid the green drives? I assumed those were less power hungry and spinning slower so more reliable. I've been ordering them for RAID5 arrays and not had too many issues yet.
- toyg 13y ago
  My experience is that they spin down way too often for server usage, and eventually break much faster than others. Some of them were also crippled in firmware so you couldn't use them in RAID1 arrays, but this might have changed.
  - pedrocr 13y ago
    Isn't spin down controlled by the host and not the drive?
    - jzwinck 13y ago
      Some drives like WD's Green series have variable RPM to save power (and therefore heat). I don't think the OS is involved at all with controlling how fast those disks spin (so long as they are spinning at all).
      - nknighthb 13y ago
        WD's marketroids tried very hard to give people that impression, but it's false. http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771438.pdf http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771... At the very bottom, in small, grey text, you'll find "IntelliPower" defined as: "A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. For each WD Green drive model, WD may use a different, invariable RPM."
    - cnvogel 13y ago
      The host can spin down a drive manually, but most often it's done autonomously be the drive. ‣ In Linux you can manually ... • check the power state of your drive using: hdparm -C /dev/sda • manually spin down the drive (standby) using: hdparm -y /dev/sda (it will immediately spin up at the first attempt to read a sector) ‣ Or you configure the automatic standby of the drive (which also does not involve the OS)... • hdparm -S n /dev/sda will configure the timeout of the drive to a value encoding the time to spin-down on a non-linear scale, check the manpage • hdparm -B n /dev/sda will configure another type of power management which doesn't specify a fixed timeout, but rather a vendor-defined type of arbitrary power saving measures on a scale of 1..254 (1: waste power, 254: conserve power, n>128 allows spin down) The latter two options are handled internally by the drive and (as far as I know) even stored non-volatile. http://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm http://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm (Edit: fixed my broken English ;-) )

JoeAltmaier 13y ago

I have to suspect its because bleeding-edge drives have to be over-rated to compete. They have better margins which should mean they could afford better quality. But they can barely make the drive at all; they want to ship before reliability is quite there; so top-end drives are sketchy.

xeroxmalf 13y ago

The RED drives you are refering to actually have some of the worst reviews around compared to even normal consumer drives. (Source: newegg reviews you mentioned)

leeoniya 13y ago
i'm not sure where you're getting that info: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236343 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236... http://www.amazon.com/WD-Red-NAS-Hard-Drive/dp/B008JJLZ7G http://www.amazon.com/WD-Red-NAS-Hard-Drive/dp/B008JJLZ7G been running 3x of these in a raid-5 NAS, no issues so far (not that it's any kind of indicator on a system which idles as a backup all day)
- sp332 13y ago
  About half of the Newegg reviews are 3-eggs or lower. And even some of the 5-egg reviews mention dead drives! They only got 5 eggs because of Newegg's easy return policy. The drives are clearly unreliable.
  - leeoniya 13y ago
    great :(

pedrocr 13y ago

Why avoid the green drives? I assumed those were less power hungry and spinning slower so more reliable. I've been ordering them for RAID5 arrays and not had too many issues yet.

toyg 13y ago
My experience is that they spin down way too often for server usage, and eventually break much faster than others. Some of them were also crippled in firmware so you couldn't use them in RAID1 arrays, but this might have changed.
- pedrocr 13y ago
  Isn't spin down controlled by the host and not the drive?
  - jzwinck 13y ago
    Some drives like WD's Green series have variable RPM to save power (and therefore heat). I don't think the OS is involved at all with controlling how fast those disks spin (so long as they are spinning at all).
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      WD's marketroids tried very hard to give people that impression, but it's false. http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771438.pdf http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771... At the very bottom, in small, grey text, you'll find "IntelliPower" defined as: "A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. For each WD Green drive model, WD may use a different, invariable RPM."
  - cnvogel 13y ago
    The host can spin down a drive manually, but most often it's done autonomously be the drive. ‣ In Linux you can manually ... • check the power state of your drive using: hdparm -C /dev/sda • manually spin down the drive (standby) using: hdparm -y /dev/sda (it will immediately spin up at the first attempt to read a sector) ‣ Or you configure the automatic standby of the drive (which also does not involve the OS)... • hdparm -S n /dev/sda will configure the timeout of the drive to a value encoding the time to spin-down on a non-linear scale, check the manpage • hdparm -B n /dev/sda will configure another type of power management which doesn't specify a fixed timeout, but rather a vendor-defined type of arbitrary power saving measures on a scale of 1..254 (1: waste power, 254: conserve power, n>128 allows spin down) The latter two options are handled internally by the drive and (as far as I know) even stored non-volatile. http://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm http://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm (Edit: fixed my broken English ;-) )