Settling the HD debate WAS: Re: [mythtv-users] A warning about Samsung HDDs

[Brady]

Let me just restate for the record here: We had thousands of drive
failures under my belt. We could trace the cause of the exact failure
for virtually all drives. It was our job to understand what part would
fail in every drive so that we could make sure that it wasn't ours.

In all of the testing that I have done cache had very little actual
real life return as far as reliability of the drive. Drives with 2MB
of cache or drives with a solid state read mirror where just as prone
to failure. (This is from a sample size of a few thousand)

What does kill drives:
Temperature (Cold and Hot, check the recommended running temp for the drive)
Power Supply (Cheap power supplies kill everything, invest here to
save hardware later)
Controller Card/Components (Believe it or not about half our failures
could be traced to poor signals from the main board or controller
card.)

So do not super cool drives, and buy really good power supplies and
motherboards. Intel/nVIDIA have good track records as far as chip sets
go. Up until three years ago Via motherboards where total crap. I
havn't worked on there new stuff but I have heard that it has gotten
better. I still won't buy it though.



On 10/31/05, Robert Denier <denier at umr.edu> wrote:
> I didn't see this mentioned so I thought I'd add it.  Hard drives come
> with different amounts of cache ram.  I believe 16MB is about the
> largest out now.
>
> The point being that a larger cache may result in a bit less work for
> the moving components which in turn may result in longer life.  I'm not
> sure this would matter in practice though.  Still, if your getting a new
> drive, I'd look for at least an 8MB cache for performance reasons if
> nothing else..
>
> Another thing worth considering, particularly if you use many of the
> same drives is how much power they use.  High power usage will make them
> harder to keep cool and cost some more electric wise..
>
> A final factor to consider is how much noise they make.  I don't think
> that has a direct relationship with reliability though since there are a
> variety of physical components in a drive...
>
> -Robert
>
>
>
>
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