[ale] Which large capacity drives are you having the best luck with?

[Pat Regan]

On Thu, 6 Jan 2011 10:30:40 -0500
Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at gmail.com> wrote:

> Read the WD paper on Advanced Format drives.  iirc, they were pretty
> explicit about it being a single ECC for the entire 4KB physical
> sector.  In fact it was a driving force for the change.

I've been under the impression that the excitement WD had over the 4k
sector drives was regarding the empty space between sectors.

The empty space is required but the empty space between each 512 and
4096 byte sector is the same length.  That means they're only wasting
1/8th as much space.

If they are actually using less ECC data per bit of stored data that
makes me a little nervous.  

> Roughly 10 GB/min.  Surprisingly fast, but not outlandishly fast.
> I'll stick with my belief that a long self test is a surface scan.

It is extremely fast for a machine with active drives.  

> Admittedly some RAM failures can slip by the above, so we add in a
> memtest++ on regular basis.

I hate when memtest++ fails.  I've had bad motherboards and cpus show
up as memtest failures.  Putting in fresh ram and watching it fail
again is such a time sink...

Pat