<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 8:31 AM, Richard Morton <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:richard.e.morton@gmail.com">richard.e.morton@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<p>Its interesting hearing so many views on hd's.<br></p></blockquote><div><br><br>IMO, what happens is that people get failures from a lot or manufacturer over a short time and write them off for years. In the mean time, someone else tries the brand and finds that they work fine, then suddenly they have a problem later. It's all about timing. Every manufacturer has had a bad batch or model for whatever reason. The Seagate 1.5TB fiasco is only the most recent. I'm sure we all remember the "Deathstar" mess IBM had further back as well, yet now people recommend Hitachi. Unfortunately, the trend among consumer drive makers has been trending toward lower warranties and cheaper components, increasing failure rates. With data density going up, I have little faith in them anymore. I'm thinking that I'm going to have to go to RAID6 or equivalent (RAIDZ2 on my fileserver) just because of the way the makers have been doing things. It sucks to lose another drive worth of data, but if it means I don't have to restore from backup, that's worth a lot to me. Restoring takes forever when you're talking about TBs of data, even with HDDs used for backups. <br>
<br>When Seagate went to 5 year warranties I gave them a chance. And I have had great luck with those 400G drives. They are still running great. Now that they are back to 3 years, I'm not sure who to buy from. I'm seriously considering paying the price penalty for "RAID Class/Enterprise" drives for the longer warranties, even though it approaches 50%. Sort of defeats the "I" in "RAID", but what is one to do? Or I can buy a couple extra 1.5TB $100 drives and do RAIDZ2 or RAIDZ3 and just expect to lose one or two here and there I guess. Tradeoffs, always the tradeoffs. :) <br>
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