[ale] Do all new large SATA drives suck?

[Neal Rhodes]

I agree that you can go nuts reading gossip and venom without any
statistical basis.   Although I do read more 5-5 review on WD disks.
The mere presence of so many gripes, particular on Seagate drives, makes
me wonder about that "quiet majority".   Which is precisely why I figure
the ALE group has an opinion on it.   Thus far what i'm hearing is to
avoid Seagate. 

Neal

On Fri, 2012-03-02 at 11:27 -0500, Jeff Hubbs wrote:

> Consider that the vast majority of people buy and use those drives
> without incident and never think to put a review saying so on any one
> particular vendor site.
> 
> On 3/2/12 11:18 AM, Neal Rhodes wrote: 
> 
> > I've gone ahead and ordered an HP core i3 system to be our next
> > Centos home/office server. 
> > 
> > It's  got a 1.5TB drive; normally on these off-lease units I'd buy
> > two brand new drives and mirror them.  Or that's what we've done
> > with the last 3 linux servers.     All of which are still
> > technically functioning since Fedora core 1. 
> > 
> > This drive is likely about a year old, so I'm thinking I'll just buy
> > a new 1.5TB drive and install Centos to mirror the primary. 
> > 
> > When I look at the crop of 1 - 1.5TB drives on TigerDirect and read
> > the reviews, they seem to be uniformly terrible - DOA,  failed after
> > 3 weeks, replacement failed after a week, etc.  Seagate seems to be
> > the worst, although WD not too far behind. 
> > 
> > Ummm, isn't one of the primary selling features of a disk drive that
> > it's not supposed to blow up and take down all your data with it?
> > Has there been a massive quality slip in the last couple years since
> > I last bought drives?    Seriously -  I can lose a power supply, a
> > motherboard, a display - you name it, and once I replace it I can
> > expect to still have the data.    Yes, I should do backups, and I
> > do, and yes, I should mirror the drives, and I do.    I should do
> > SMARTD monitoring and I do.  But isn't this like selling tires that
> > tend to shred randomly?    Isn't not blowing up catastrophically
> > with no warning beforehand a basic selling point for disk drives?
> > What's the point of mirroring if the odds are good that both drives
> > will fail completely the same week?   What's the point of SMARTD
> > monitoring if the darn drive quits without warning? 
> > 
> > Does anybody make a decent drive in that size range?     
> > 
> > I'm thinking that not even considering economy,  my old theory of
> > buying a pair of new identical drives may not be wise anymore, and
> > sticking with one drive that has lasted over a year and one new
> > drive is a better plan. 
> > 
> > Thoughts? 
> > 
> > Neal 
> > 
> > 
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