[ale] The perpetual question: best current HDD?

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Kinda like asking what's the best car.

Anyway, I've always liked Seagate.  Still look for 5 yr warranties.  They're getting harder to find but some are still out there.  Blast the new drives before putting them into service with a SpinRite Level 4 test several times or a badblocks DESTRUCTIVE write test several times.  Each cycle through badblocks writes then reads 0000, 1010, 0101, 1111.  Each cycle takes about 3 days on a 1 TB drive.  I'd run at least 2 cycles.  More or less comparable SpinRite activity would be 6 - 8 repeats through the entire drive.  SpinRite is non destructive.  Note that the badblocks NONDESTRUCTIVE read write test can be run with data on the drive.  In this case, badblocks reads the data, writes a random value, reads it, then rewrites the original data, which is Similar to what SpinRite does.  If using badblocks NONDESTRUCTIVE read write test, I would run 6 - 8 passes.

Having said all that, I just RMA's two 1 TB Seagate drives that started throwing reallocated sector errors after 3 years of power on time.  I run them pretty much continuously, but they're not in RAID.  They were swapped out under warranty, which I wouldn't have had if I got 1, 2, or 3 year warranties.

Based on other discussions here, I would recommend doing background data scrubbing on the RAID array to force each drive to read every sector once or twice a year.  Read / write testing is even better.  You can manually do this a couple of times per year with Spinrite or Badblocks.  Routine file systems checks are a good idea too.

I would also recommend using gsmartcontrol to turn on all the smart monitoring that is available on the drive.  Check that all the smart stats are good before putting it on line, after stress testing it, particularly reallocated sectors.  Set up a way to monitor the smart parameters on an ongoing basis and receive alarms if they get out of line.  It wouldn't be a bad idea to monitor temperature too.  Drives cannot take as much heat as CPU's in general.  I think they start getting unhappy around 50 deg C.

I believe one of the Mike's here commented once that drives over 1 TB tended to be less reliable, if I recall correctly.  Perhaps they can comment on that.

Sincerely,

Ron



Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> wrote:

>Hey all,
>
>I'm looking to replace some 1TB HDDs in a s/w RAID-10 array with some
>2TB models.  The existing drives have been running flawlessly for a few
>years, so they are due to get swapped out anyways.  I did have one disk
>fail a year or so ago so it was swapped out, and I bought a cold spare
>at the same time so I have one more spare (of the same type/model as
>the
>replacement drive).  So I'm looking for another pair of drives that I
>can use as the mirrors (so each mirror has one of type/batch-A and one
>of the yet-to-be-bought set of drives).
>
>Of course, when I bought the drives warranties were 3 or 5 years, not
>the '1 or 2' years they are now.  So I'm looking for the "best value"
>2TB drives available today -- lowest price for highest quality + good
>warranty.  It looks like I can pretty much only choose between WD and
>Seagate nowadays -- I guess lots of consolidation in the market?  (My
>existing drives were Hitachi, which in my experience were always great
>drives).
>
>What's the current going theories and best practices?  Any concrete
>suggestions (links to NewEgg or some other vendor would be
>appreciated).
>
>:)
>
>Thanks,
>
>-derek


--

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Ron Frazier
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