<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>
ah, I always just lived by the "cheaper" rule. Decide what features I<br>
want, buy the cheapest drive. I've since been vindicated, Google's<br>
extensive hard drive report has shown no statistical difference<br>
amongst manufacturers and models (obviously outside issues like the<br>
"deathstar" and the current Seagate 1.5TB model debacle). As such one<br>
will currently find a mix of Samsung, Seagate, Maxtor, WD and Toshiba<br>
drives in my 3 Myth computers, my laptop and my two external drives. I<br>
also currently have 8 drives (1xSeagate, 1xToshiba, 4xMaxtor, 2xWD)<br>
well out of their warranty period that all are running with no errors,<br>
weird noises, etc. That I believe is due to them running in a very<br>
well ventilated case with a quality power supply on UPS and a little<br>
bit of luck.<br>
</blockquote></div><br>Actually Google's study did say that failure rates were highly correlated with the model and manufacturer. Unfortunately for us, they didn't name any specific manufacturers or models in their report. From the report:<br>
<br>"Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive<br>models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do<br>not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes<br>significantly when we normalize failure rates per each<br>
drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by<br>drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a<br>breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage<br>due to the proprietary nature of these data."<br>
<br>The interesting thing from the report was that higher temperatures and heavy usage didn't seem to correlate with a higher failure rates regardless of manufacturer. The report is short and easy to read or just skim over if anybody wants to look more closely: <a href="http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf">http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf</a>.<br>