Most reliable 250GB SATA drives?

[Fred Finisterre]

I've experienced an excessive amount of disk failures over the last few
years, so now I'd like to set up a mirrored raid array of 4 x 250GB SATA
drives (i.e. 500GB usable).

Anybody have any opinions as to the most reliable drives? I'm getting fed up
with losing all my data.

Cheers,

Fred.

 

[J. Clarke]

I've experienced an excessive amount of disk failures over the last few
years, so now I'd like to set up a mirrored raid array of 4 x 250GB SATA
drives (i.e. 500GB usable).

Anybody have any opinions as to the most reliable drives? I'm getting fed
up with losing all my data.

A lot of people have opinions. Few have real statistics to back them up.
Use one brand for one half of the mirror and another for the other and
you're covered.

 

[Bioboffin]

I've experienced an excessive amount of disk failures over the last
few years, so now I'd like to set up a mirrored raid array of 4 x
250GB SATA drives (i.e. 500GB usable).

Anybody have any opinions as to the most reliable drives? I'm getting
fed up with losing all my data.

Cheers,

Fred.

What are you doing to your drives???

I operate a network with 50+ pcs. Together with my home pcs over the last
twenty years, I have only ever seen three hard drive failures. One of those
was due to my moving the pc while the drive was running. Another was a SMART
error which involved no loss of data. The third was a controller failure.

Three out of probably 200 drives.

Take care,

John.

 

[Nick]

What are you doing to your drives???

I operate a network with 50+ pcs. Together with my home pcs over the last
twenty years, I have only ever seen three hard drive failures. One of those
was due to my moving the pc while the drive was running. Another was a SMART
error which involved no loss of data. The third was a controller failure.

Three out of probably 200 drives.

Some drives models had more than 10% of failure per year (and i'm not
speaking about the deskstars). So you got probably lucky by choosing
the proper model each time.

Even the resellers admit at least 0.5% of failure/year for standart
IDE drive


Nick

 

[Bioboffin]

Some drives models had more than 10% of failure per year (and i'm not
speaking about the deskstars). So you got probably lucky by choosing
the proper model each time.

Even the resellers admit at least 0.5% of failure/year for standart
IDE drive

I guess that the risk of overheating pcs has increased the chance of failure
in recent years. 10% failure per year sounds seriously worrying. The 0.5%
failure per year seems more reasonable, especially if one includes user
error (such as careless installing in a static zone; hitting with a hammer
to try to make it work ;-) etc.) - after all, that is 1/200 per year, which
equates to my 3/200 given a 3 year life of a pc.

John.

 

[J. Clarke]

I guess that the risk of overheating pcs has increased the chance of
failure in recent years. 10% failure per year sounds seriously worrying.
The 0.5% failure per year seems more reasonable, especially if one
includes user error (such as careless installing in a static zone; hitting
with a hammer to try to make it work ;-) etc.) - after all, that is 1/200
per year, which equates to my 3/200 given a 3 year life of a pc.

I suspect that part of the problem for aftermarket OEM drives is
shipping--the drop-shippers that most of the online resellers use seem to
pack them in a single layer of bubble-wrap, which is kind of light for the
tender ministrations of UPS.

 

[Arno Wagner]

I've experienced an excessive amount of disk failures over the last few
years, so now I'd like to set up a mirrored raid array of 4 x 250GB SATA
drives (i.e. 500GB usable).

Anybody have any opinions as to the most reliable drives? I'm getting fed up
with losing all my data.

If you had massive losses, maybe it is a systematic problem not
with the disks? Cooling/bad PSUs/vibration?

Or where these all IBM drives?

Side note: Nobody has long experience with any 250GB SATA drives
since they are not on the market long enough. However if you add
a 5th drive as cold spare, you should be fine with your set-up.
Best approach IMO is to look for a drive where you get a fast
warranty replacement and that has at least 3 years warranty.
I think Seagate has now 5 years, Maxtor has 3 years, Samsung
also has 3 years, but no 250GB drives.

Arno

 

[J. Clarke]

If you had massive losses, maybe it is a systematic problem not
with the disks? Cooling/bad PSUs/vibration?

Or where these all IBM drives?

Side note: Nobody has long experience with any 250GB SATA drives
since they are not on the market long enough. However if you add
a 5th drive as cold spare, you should be fine with your set-up.
Best approach IMO is to look for a drive where you get a fast
warranty replacement and that has at least 3 years warranty.
I think Seagate has now 5 years, Maxtor has 3 years, Samsung
also has 3 years, but no 250GB drives.

FWIW, Seagate does have 5 years, took delivery of a couple of their drives
about a week ago and checked the warranty status and they're warrantied
through 2009.

Also, RAID-6 might be worth looking into--stays up with not one but two
drives failed. Tekram has SATA hardware solutions for both PCI-X and PCI
Express buses and there's experimental support in the Linux 2.6 kernel.
Would give the same capacity in the given configuration as RAID-1 but with
RAID-6 you don't lose data until 3 drives have failed, with RAID-1 if the
wrong two drives fail then you lose data. Downside is the same as RAID-5,
write performance.