[mythtv-users] Re: Hard Drives that Actually Work?

Steve Christall mythtv at mctubster.com
Tue Dec 14 21:43:12 UTC 2004


CrAzY mAD wrote:

>As jra at baylink pointed out, no IDE personal
>computer drive, from any manufacture, is designed to
>run 24x7x365.  
>According to Seagate, a PS (personal storage) drive is
>only designed to be on for 8 hours a day, 300 days a
>year.  This equates to 2,400 hours a year.  A ES
>(enterprise storage) drive runs 8,760 hours on a
>24x7x365 schedule.  Those additonal hours increased
>the failure rate almost two-fold!  "Past work
>comparing the reliability of PS against ES drives
>reported a filure rate of 25% for 24 IDE drives
>against 2% for 368 SCSI drives over an 18 month
>period.  However, these numbers cannot be treated as a
>controlled sutdy due to the very small smaple size for
>the PS drives." ~ Seagate whitepaper
>
>There's a very interesting read on this in a Seagate
>whitepaper
>(http://www.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/whitepaper/D2c_More_than_Interface_ATA_vs_SCSI_042003.pdf)
>
>  
>
An interesting read, however consider these two points

1 / I have been told by two large storage vendors that they "cherry 
pick" the best SATA drives for their Enterprise Disk Arrays.  You can 
read this in various ways, I take it to mean that while hard-drives past 
testing to be sold, they are not all equal (similar to testing and speed 
rating CPU's)
2 / Hard drives are so reliable now, that even if running a drive 
designed for personal usage in server based loads, the use of hardware 
based RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) with online spares / 
auto rebuild etc approach this risk toward zero.  One should be far more 
worried about software bugs and operator error than the hardware!

Oh, and always keep off-site backups

Steve




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