[SGVLUG] which hard drive for RAID? + note on reliability of laptops

[matti]

Hi,

wow, the more I read on this the more lawyer like
answer seems appropriate "it depends"

drives have a higher failure rate than the OEMs
have listed. 

Looks like once you start getting SMART errors it
is time to save $ for a new drive.

reportedly the temp is LESS of an issue than we thought

tho other environmental issues i suspect still can be
an issue.. vibrations, humidity, and power surges i would think

remember SOME drives are designed to be raid drives,
and other desktop drives. ( cache on drive differences iirc )

> What make/model drives do most people use in
> their fileservers, ie, 24x7, especially if it will be part
> of a RAID?

reportedly the scsi ( now SAS ) drives are supposed
to be more reliable than the consumer SATA.
( tho I have seen some reports that they are
about the same .. )

but SAS drives are pricey... and I think you're 
looking for SATA

hmmm... i recall having a lot of problems in the
past buying HDs from Frys. Personally I dont trust
fry's for HDs anymore.

Here's some interesting reading I looked at:

Study: Hard Drive Failure Rates Much Higher Than Makers Estimate
http://www.pcworld.com/article/129558/study_hard_drive_failure_rates_much_higher_than_makers_estimate.html


Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You?
http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder.html

"Interestingly, we observe little difference in replacement rates between SCSI, FC and SATA drives, potentially an indication that disk-independent factors, such as operating conditions, affect replacement rates more than component specific factors. On the other hand, we see only one instance of a customer rejecting an entire population of disks as a bad batch, in this case because of media error rates, and this instance involved SATA disks. "


interestingly in another article it states that heat may not
be as much an issue with HD failure

http://www.pcworld.com/article/129420/high_heat_may_not_harm_hard_drives.html


this maybe interesting.. especially the references

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf




OH and speaking of reliability:
1 in 3 laptops die in first three years
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/154921


best
matti