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Seagate had a firmware bug around that generation of drives. The bug caused drives to fail after a few months of use. http://www.anandtech.com/show/3482
I have had good experiences with Seagate. I own five Seagate drives, ages 4-10 years. All still work.
Ed
BTW I don't think IBM has manufactured any hdds for years. As bad as some series of the DeskStar drives were (class action suit) I still bought several and just made sure they were kept as cool as possible.
Well, while that is true, the IBM hard disk division was sold to Hitachi and operate(s/d) as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, I was talking to some of the guys from HGST a few months ago, and they are still operating as a separate division, in spite of being sold on yet again.
I'd like to see statistics that Seagate hard drives are any less reliable than the other majors like Western Digital since everyone here is shitting on them. My last 5 hard drives have been SG Barracudas, made tons of use out of all them since the 90s, they never failed on me, I just upgraded them when I needed more space. My only personal experience with Western Digital has been with an external hard drive that failed after about a year. My anecdotal evidence says WD blows.
While reading another thread about a failed drive, this thread came to mind so I thought I'd add one more data point...
After 2-1/2+ years on these drives, no problems, no reallocated sectors, no hickups... If I needed to replace another drive today it would come from the same gene-pool.
Any others who participated here care to update their own experiences since that time?
I think mostly it will depend on usage of the drive. Things like compiling large RAM eating packages, disk thrashing, and heavy write rates will impact any drive regardless of media type. This is why I don't do SSDs yet. Those magnetic platters can take serious usage abuse.
Yea, usage certainly is the determining factor, all else being equal.
In that regard, the laptop drive (1TB) and one of the 2TB 3.5 dirves both spend a good part of each day compiling and doing DB analytics. So that speaks well for both of those.
I have compiled the sadistic xulrunner on both machines (laptop is 32 bit) more than once, but that is more a test of my own endurance than of the hardware! My doctors say that I sould not do that any more.
IMO, no matter what type of drive you have, you should run smartd and scrape your logs for error messages. You can even use SNMP to report the results.
Yea, usage certainly is the determining factor, all else being equal.
In that regard, the laptop drive (1TB) and one of the 2TB 3.5 dirves both spend a good part of each day compiling and doing DB analytics. So that speaks well for both of those.
I have compiled the sadistic xulrunner on both machines (laptop is 32 bit) more than once, but that is more a test of my own endurance than of the hardware! My doctors say that I sould not do that any more.
Xulrunner ranks up there in the hardware torture-test department. It's estimated to use about 6GB of RAM and/or swap space... yeah not a hardware friendly package to build mind you, especially when it starts into the swap space after your measly 4GB of system RAM suddenly run out.
wd green series have a some problems with head parking counter, as i remember.
i have a seagate, and a wd disks too, failing is very rare. but in any way, i use two disks in software raid1 in desktop, and the same thing on my homeserver too - there always is risk to fail drive, even most pricey one.
now i be on way to try hybrid ( ssd and hdd) drives - it has price about as old HDD, but must be a bit faster in some moments.
IMO, no matter what type of drive you have, you should run smartd and scrape your logs for error messages. You can even use SNMP to report the results.
no need to scrape logs - you can set up smartd to message to you, when drive prefail attribute changes, as io remember. instruction seeing on some paper about how to make software raid 1 on slackware....
wd green series have a some problems with head parking counter, as i remember.
There is a Linux utility called "wdidle3" to change the head unloading idle timeout (or disable it completely) on the WD Green series.
This will be at the expense of slightly increased power consumption, but less wear on the drive heads.
This will be at the expense of slightly increased power consumption, but less wear on the drive heads.
While it is a 20% increase in power consumption, we're only talking about less than a watt (0.72w) (SOURCE). The wdidle3 program just parks the head, but doesn't affect the platter rotation. The reason you see a slight savings when the head is parked is because it no longer creates any drag on the platters that the motor has to overcome (to maintain the proper speeds).
If your computer runs 24/7, and your electricity costs $0.15/KWh (almost double what is costs here -- $0.08/KWh during the more expensive summer months), you're looking at less than a dollar extra every YEAR. Even if you had 5 harddrives, it is less than $0.40 extra per month.
point of using wdidle is not in energy savings, but in that fact, the device ( hdd) has have a lifetime parameter of parking heads or so on - not clearly remember, it is regarding WD green series, and count is about 300 000. and as i read, on some servers that parameter grow on thousands every day, who in result do very short hdd life. i bit investigating that question about a 2 years ago, when purchase my wd30ezra for fileserver storage.
Just to throw in some numbers about WD Green longevity, I bought this one in 2009, IIRC:
Code:
Model Family: Western Digital Caviar Green
Device Model: WDC WD5000AADS-00S9B0
...
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 049 049 000 Old_age Always - 37235
...
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 013 013 000 Old_age Always - 561696
This drive had different roles in its lifetime, being part of a RAID-0 and RAID-5 array (using mdadm), running standalone and nowadays being part of a BTRFS RAID-1. Still working like on day one, exactly zero problems.
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