[Leica] Seagate

[jbm at jbm.org (Jeff Moore)]

2009-07-31-15:02:28 Tina Manley:
> I know all hard drives fail eventually but which one is the "Leica" 
> of hard drives?  Are there any that are more dependable? Are the 1T's 
> more likely to fail than a smaller capacity one?

I know Brian has some ideas about keeping a size or two down from the
current bleeding-edge maximum.

As for Seagates, I'd been choosing them for a number of years, but have
been avoiding buying then for a year or two because of the recent furor
over flaky drives in the 1T and I think 1.5T generations (which may have
been tracked down to a firmware problem and resolved, but I'm not
sure).  I've taken a flier with Western Digital (some of their Green
Power drives, and some RE3s in the RAID array of a NAS), but have no
useful data to report -- they haven't failed, but I don't have enough
drives or enough hours on them for that to be meaningful.

I wouldn't touch the whole class of compact single-drive-per-enclosure
external disks, for a number of reasons.  Not only have I had some of
them (various brands) fail, which doesn't surprise me that much as I
suspect there are often cooling and power supply issues, but they tend
to be unreasonably expensive per-drive if you expect to use a few.

On the cooling and power-supply front: high heat kills drives, and a
friend who ran a bunch of servers pointed out that he often had drive
failures when the drives were in enclosures with less-than-stellar power
supplies.  One thing I might suggest is making the upfront investment in
a high-quality external drive enclosure, with good cooling and power,
which allow drives to be added or swapped with a small per-drive
investment ($30 or less) in a little drive sled.  I've had good luck
with a Sonnet external-SATA enclosure:

  http://sonnettech.com/product/fusiond500p.html

  
http://www.amazon.com/Fusion-D500P-Enclosure-cables-Drives/dp/B000VEOIDU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249071414&sr=8-1

...which some Amazon buyers seem not to like.  I dunno, it's worked fine
for me.  I use it for drives I'm writing backups to, communicating with
it via a port-multiplied eSATA (external serial ATA) connection provided
by an appropriate controller card.  (Having gotten spoiled by external
SATA disks running at the full speed they'd deliver inside the computer,
I don't see myself using FireWire or, even worse, USB external disks
again, except perhaps temporarily from a laptop).

That's for writing to changeable drives from rotating pools used as
backup destinations.  For longer-term, more reliable storage (although,
still, EVERYTHING needs to be backed up), I'm a huge fan of ReadyNAS
network-attached-storage boxes:

  http://www.readynas.com/

A 3- or 4-disk array NV+ is a fine, stable choice, reliable if not
blisteringly fast.  The ReadyNAS Pro not only allows a bunch more space,
it's actually fast enough to be used as additional mounted storage on
your computer without getting annoyed with how slow the transfers are
compared with local disk.  (This is of course assuming you're using
wired gigabit ether, but doesn't everyone by now for home
infrastructure?)

Before, I mentioned heat and bad power killing drives.  A good enclosure
will provide decent cooling, one hopes there's a good power supply in
that enclosure, and...  I assume you never even turn on a computer or
drive which isn't plugged into a good-quality UPS (uninterruptable power
supply), right?  Unless it's a laptop, whose battery constitutes a UPS
in its own way?  And you ensure that every single piece of equipment on
your wired network is run off either a UPS with
surge/overvoltage/undervoltage protection or at least a surge protector
which does the same?

 -J