[mythtv-users] MB fried - suggestions to replace or upgrade?

[Stroller]

On 27 Mar 2007, at 17:30, matthew.garman at gmail.com wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 03:33:16PM +0100, Stroller wrote:
>> There are some opinions on hard-drives in this Usenet thread. Odie
>> Ferrous does data recovery for a living, and my customers & I have
>> both been satisfied with his work.
>> ...
>> <http://groups.google.com/group/uk.comp.homebuilt/browse_frm/thread/
>> 17365eb4e5a2b6/>
>
> I believe hard drives are the luck of the draw these days,
> regardless of manufacturer.  If you look long enough, you'll find
> statements like the above to support or oust *any* brand.

Indeed, but I'm pretty confident that Odie is independent with no axe  
to grind.

> Recently, two drive reliability studies have been published, one by
> Google and I forget who did the other one.  IIRC, no one brand was a
> standout for better or worse.

   Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models,
   manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this
   fact. For example, Figure 2 changes significantly when we normalize
   failure rates per each drive model. Most age-related results are
   impacted by drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show
   a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to
   the proprietary nature of these data.
   <http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf>, section 3.2,  
page 4.

> I used to swear by Seagate, but my recent ones run hot and generate
> a lot of SMART errors, even though they actually seem to be okay.
> Only a few years ago, I RMA'd several Western Digitals, but now I've
> got 4x400GB "RE2" WD drives that have been very robust, surviving
> several case migrations.

I have to say that I've bought quite a few Western Digital drives  
myself the past 3 years or so. I believe that around the time i  
became self-employed they were offering 3 year warranties and other  
manufacturers were dropping to 1 year. I don't think I've ever had to  
call a warranty on one of then, but I don't have to think about it to  
know that Seagate's RMA centre is in the Netherlands

Nevertheless, I would rather trust the empirical experiences of  
someone who deals with numerous hard-drives per-day, rather than my  
own experiences handling a handful of drives myself.

> My general thoughts: don't count on hard drives being a "safe"
> storage mechanism (either have good backups or 3x redundancy); buy
> for value (lowest price with best warranty+silence features).

Indeed.

Stroller.