[mythtv-users] The Bigger... Disk contest, Fall 2007 edition

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 05:28:36PM -0400, f-myth-users at media.mit.edu wrote:
> After replacing one drive four times and the other one twice, within
> a span of about 3 years, I put Seagates in it.  It's been years and
> neither has ever failed.  Yes, both the Maxtors and Seagates were
> theoretically rated for 24x7 operation, etc etc.  Obviously both are
> ATA.  Obviously, there's more to the story.  (None of them were
> "AV-rated" drives or anything fancy; they were essentially the
> cheapest drive of the given capacity available from either vendor.)

Exactly what my experience is of Maxtors and Seagates.  In fact, almost
every drive I've lost in the last 3 years (and I'm responsible, one way
and another, for close to 500 machines) has been a Maxtor.  They bought
Conner and ruined them (I think it was Maxtor).  I *never* lost a
Conner, they were good even during Seagate's interregnum back in the
late 90s.

> During that interval, I also had a Maxtor in a desktop that simply
> spun 99% of the time and was in active use a few minutes a day, hence
> it moved its head only a few minutes a day.  It died, TOO, just
> sitting there spinning, with the click of death, so while duty cycle
> certainly -accelerated- the failures -I- saw, in -my- environment, it
> wasn't the whole story; the baseline failure rate with almost zero use
> was still so fast that the drives failed within their first year or
> two of operation.  I won't use Maxtors again in anything.  I currently
> have -far- more Seagates in service than I ever had Maxtors, and I've
> never had one fail.  Yes, there have since been various mergers of
> companies and product lines; in particular, some "Seagate" drives are
> now made by what used to be Maxtor.

Citation, please?

>                                         Uh oh...  But what this also
> means is that lore and old-wive's-tales from years ago are unlikely
> to be correct -now-, so you need to heavily discount the "accepted
> wisdom" that dates from 10 years ago and look at failure rates of the
> drives you're buying -today-.

Sure.  My view of the disk drive market is a weighted moving average.  

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
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