STA disks - reliability?
 

Looking at getting a bunch of disks for a work server. Up to 6 SATA disks in a RAID config. Probably 500GB - maybe bigger but 500 seems to be the cut-off for the price hike. They seem to be up to about £80. Now I would like 10K rpm drives but they seem to max. out at 150GB (for SATA) so that leaves 7500rpm ones. Not too up with buying disks of this size so what makes are the most reliable - in people opinion?

Ta.

Dave

They are all pretty much the same really, you can get some unlucky drives (I just had a failure from a Maxtor 300Gb). Samsung had some issues with their early 120Gb drives, but that is meant to be sorted now. I certainly hope so as I just got a 500Gb drive from them.

If you are going for a RAID array, reliability may not be that important as if there are any failures you should not actually lose any data. The warranty period that they offer you may be more important, as that keeps the costs down if you have any issues (it makes sure you get an identical replacement). You just take out the defective drive and plug in the replacement when it arrives. You may want to look into replacement times that the different manufacturers offer. Some let you buy a new one for immediate shipping, with a refund being given when you return your defective unit.

Samsung are the quietest at the moment if that is an issue for you. My new drive is entirely whine free, with low seek noise. AAM is currently disabled.

Doh! Shame I can't spell SATA ....... :-(

Last time I looked SAS drives have a MTBF 3 times that of SATA

Would the avoid Western digital drives IMHO, barring one that failed, and another that has some dodgy sectors (not enough for a RTM though....but I will give it time as another 2 duff sectors popped up the other week :( )

IMO one 100% drive out of three isn't exactly promising. Plus they whine and are noisy when accessing , especially when they automatically do a idle mode surface scan (hardware/SMART intitated )when the system is idle or doing little activity (like browsing scoobynet)...it drives me nuts. I have to do something that requires drive activity on the system to shut them up :mad:

Also have an IBM Hitachi, now dispite their previous old generation drives having a dire repuation, that is of the past and this one seems to be a good one. But it is very clunky when accessing lots of data.

Just something to bear in mind when shopping :)

Compared to IDE drives in my experience they are more unreliable.

I five years of business I have seen 1 IDE hard drive failure but 6 SATA drives, which where all western digital drives and this is despite most of my customers still having older PC with IDE drives.

If youre going for SATA then I reccommend Seagate, Maxtor or Samsung as I have yet to have any problems with these. (note the word: YET :norty: )

I agree newer generation drives seem more unrelibale. The only IDE drive failures I''ve ever seen before were the old "deathstars" and an aincient 10gig Maxtor...although its the only Maxtor I've had fail, and we still run 5 of them in old PIIIs that are in daily use.

I don't think the fact its SATA is to blame though; as at one point many drives were just IDE drives converted to a SATA (obviously not these days). But maybe because the drive accesses and throughputs data faster and they are all 7200rpm drives maybe the bigger reason why they are more prone to failure.

Its a fact that I've suffered more failures with 7200rpm drives than I have with 5000rpm drives (both IDE and SATA). So that maybe more the reason than the interface used.

cheaper labour, cheaper components, drives now running much faster etc etc probably the reason why the failure rates are higher thesedays

In my years of computing (IT Bod) i have personally only had one drive fail of my own out of the 20 or 30 i have had, and my machines do tend to be left on a lot !

work wise we see more drive failures on desktop pc's than we ever used to

Sonic,

Do your work pc's get left on or switched off? I noticed the places that have the most failures have temporary staff and are on and off several times a day.

I dont know tbh as they arent the PC's in our office, they are our customers PC's

I think most of them leave them switched on permanently with no power saving so the drives are continously running

i've had a PC wunning 24*7 for the last year with 2 x 200GB mirroed SATA drives, not had a single problem.

however SATA disks are not certified for 24/7 usage

The gerneral rule when deciding on these disks is;

SAS is used for enterprise enviromentes where customers ask for
Performance
Reliability
Best support for Mission Critical Apps


SATA is used for low-cost storage where customers ask for
low prices
high capacities
replacement of older tape backup systems
Near-line disk backup
SAS configurations provides

I think anybody could tell you bad stories about any drive.

I had quite a few IDE 120 - 160gb Maxtors fail.

I've not had a SATA Western Digital fail yet. I find them quiet too (although that isn't an issue for me)

I also like Seagate drives.

THe Maxtor I have in my personal machine (Shuttle) is a noisy as hell Maxtor (IDE) 160gb but it has taken some hammer and still works great (*gulp*)

Silly question but what do you need 2.5 terabytes of disk for?

If its important data then I would consider using a SCSI (SAS if you want) based system.... much faster and much more reliable disks but far more expensive.

How are you going to backup this data? will you build 2 of this machine and cluster them or disk backup one to the other... I wouldnt even want to guess how many tapes you will need.. lol

There's always one asking questions ..... :D

Actually it'll now be 4 disks - finally managed to read the RAID spec. properly for the box ... ho hum ..

Anyhow, it's going to be for a SW repository so we can install machines over the net (in a lab, not a production environment). We're going for RAID 5 to provide some resiliancy BUT all the data could be retrived from CD if required - yes, it'd take a while but if worst came to worst ...
Also, another lab will be running the same SW and, more or less, the same repository, so we have that to fall back on to.
As for the capacity - the lab we're getting the SW from has 600GB+ already and we'll add to that. And with disk space you NEVER have enough. This is a new lab setup so we WILL be using the repository for uses other than this. Guaranteed! Been there and got the tee shirt previously ...

I may go for 750s as I now only have 4 to play with ..... :D

Dave

Ooh I got virtually the same thing here... using Powerquest to send the images all over the place. Ignore the backup question then... I cheated for each new imaged I created, I just burned a copy of the image to a DVD and stored it.

Sounds like you have most bases covered. And that data recovery isnt really an issue. SATA is probably right for you guys as the disk speed is probably going to be faster than your lan...

Generally speaking regarding capacity, if I can't back it up 100% I wont build it. but then again my data has to be avaliable 24/7 365 regardless. And I now cluster the majority of servers.

I can find loads of 750gb for about £120 but they are all 7200 not 10000. The 1tb stuff is all at least £190... I am assuming you are running the Raid avaliable on the motherboard? will that effect the performace of the machine? I guess the last thing you want is the PC struggling due to the Raid config? To be honest I know very little about Raid with SATA drives...

Good luck let me know what you buy..

Yep. M'B RAID. I work for Intel and so have one of these Intel® Workstation Board S5000XVN Overview available .... Going to have 2 Clovertowns at 3GHz (that's the quad core server chip) plus oodles of memory - because I can ....!

GiGe network so no problems there....

Just got to get my boss to say 'go buy the disks' ...

Dave

Lucky git :)

I can vouch for the reliability and performace of Western Digital RE (Raid Edition) Disks in a SATA Raid. They are built to enterprise class and come with a 5-year guarantee. We're currently using over 600 of these disks in various raid arrays (mostly RAID1 and RAID10) and these are on servers that are mission-critical and running 24 hours per day. In 3 years we've only had a single Western Digital disk break down - which was replaced under warranty.

We've had loads of Maxtors break down (it's why we changed to Western Digital SATA drives) and a large proportion of SCSI drives. Our experience is that SCSI disks aren't more reliable but they are more suited to certain functions and tasks.

For a SW Repository, SATA disks will be absolutely fine.