[ale] The perpetual question: best current HDD?

[Greg Clifton]

JPK III makes some good points, esp. regarding enterprise vs desk top class
drives. However, while SAS controllers handle SATA drives just fine, SATA
controllers can't handle SAS drives, so besides the fact that SAS drives
cost a bunch more than SATA drives of equivalent capacities, unless you
have a true server motherboard, you most likely don't have an embedded SAS
controller and an addin SAS controller will set you back several hundred $.
So like he said, it boils down to a question of how much $ you have to
spend.

I haven't researched the issue, but since modern drives all
use perpendicular encoding (how else could they cram 1TB on a single
platter?) it would make some sense that thermal expansion could be more of
a problem. I would assume the problem would mostly relate to the warm up
phase, so that if the drive can "find itself" at boot, maybe it might have
some trouble keeping track of tracks while the platters come up to full
operating temps, but once stabilized I would think that all would be good
again. Just a somewhat educated guess, no empirical data to back it up.
GC


On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:

> best is whatever you DON'T have unless someone else paid for what you DO
> have. :-)
>
> Seriously, enterprise drives are better than home use drives. Within each
> classification, the differences between drives are negligible over their
> lifespan. warranties are a good indicator of how well a drive tested out at
> the manufacturers facility but not a good indicator of how it will work in
> your gear with your loading, cooling, vibrations and power.
>
> Newer drives (i.e. higher capacity) seem to be more sensitive to
> temperature than drives from 5 years ago. SAS drives seems to be able to
> take temps than would melt most cheeses.
>
> In short: how much money do you have? It's often easier to build a RAID10
> and have a spare pair for cheaper than buying a pile of expensive drives
> with longer warranty. Many people have drives that are 10 years old and
> doing fine.
>
> On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 11:20 AM, 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
>>
>> --
>>        Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>>        Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>>        URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>>        warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
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>
>
>
> --
> --
> James P. Kinney III
> *
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> tail. It won't fatten the dog.
> - Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain
> *
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