[ale] difference among Seagate, WesternDigital & Maxtor ?

[Dow Hurst]

Courtney,
I have 5 x 160Gb IDE drives in a software based Raid 5 setup in our lab 
file server.  It yields good performance and reliability for the past 
year's workload.  No failures yet!  The drives are a mixture of 160Gb 
drives.  One is a nice Seagate and the rest are Samsung 3yr warranty 
"onsale for $99 at Microcenter over a year ago" drives.  I am mirroring 
that using rsync to our cluster's Raid 5 periodically.  The cluster Raid 
array is a 3ware 8port card with Seagate 5 x 250Gb SATA drives.  I 
prefer Seagate if I can afford it.  I think hard drive quality is batch 
based and buying is potluck overall.  Some drives run forever and most 
run at least beyond their warranty period.  Then there are the bad 
batches like the IBM drives that failed a few years ago.  I actually 
determined that I have two of those in my home's central machine.  They 
have survived mainly because I've not stressed them at all with high 
temperatures or high load.  I use a UPS and shutdown rarely so the 
drives idle most of the time.  I still have noticed drive noise and 
weird sounds and also the occasional message in the logs.  I've expected 
a failure and prepped for it, but it hasn't happened so I'm not throwing 
out the drives while they are working!  Good luck,
Dow