Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

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Maxtor had horrible reputation (by far the worst) among most of my friends and local forums.

Things is, all drive manufacturers have batches and you might end up with 8 dead out of 10 drives for any manufacturer at any given time.

The only thing you can do is try to get drives from different batches and thus trying to minimize having all eggs in one basket (what good is raid6 if all drives die?).

Also when a lot of drives die you should look for other culprits as well, is the temperature OK? Is the power stable? (Vibrations?)

There isn't much statistics available (that I know of) but a french store published their return-rate for drives (which of course doesn't count drives returned directly to the manufacturer)

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/831-6/disques-durs.html

Or a write up in Swedish about it (probably easier to read if you don't know either language, lot of graphs): http://www.sweclockers.com/nyhet/13859-fransk-datorsajt-publ...

But all in all, if you have many drives failing you've hit a bad batch or are treating your drives badly, nothing you can do about it (the former at least).

> Also when a lot of drives die you should look for other culprits as well, is the temperature OK? Is the power stable? (Vibrations?)

Also remember the demo from a Sun guy that showed how screaming to your RAID array had a significant impact on IO in real time (it was actually a dtrace demo): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

Someone ( in the storage industry) also told me of some crap RAID enclosure that had a normal performance until you added a drive in the center slot; then some bad vibration resonance kicked in and the performance dropped terribly :)

Maxtor had horrible reputation

Right... that's my point. I had a bad experience with WD once upon a time (multiple drives, all different batches). And when I had to build a ~1TB RAID in 2001, all of my research pointed to Maxtor. Side note: That actually turned out to be a good choice. The drives lasted 5+ years and didn't die until a fan gave out in the drive cage. Poor little guys got too hot and seized up. After all of that, I was still able to pull 99.5% of the data off of them.

What I was trying to get at is that looking at any specific case and making any blanket statements about quality of drives. Ask 5 people what are the best and worst drives and you'll get 5 different answers. We all have horror stories. The only way to know for sure is to have actual population-level data on reliability. Unfortunately, that data is somewhat hard to come by, so we all just rely on anecdotal stories.

It also depends on if we are talking consumer drives, enterprise drives, etc... I doubt that the return rate for drives would actually cover serious data errors which occurred after the return timeframe.

Honestly, the only people who could offer any insight are the large companies with huge datacenters: Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Rackspace, etc... and I doubt you'll hear them talking. If you could, I suspect the answer would be that it really doesn't matter which manufacturer you choose. All of them fail. All of them have bad batches. The best that you can do is try to minimize the MTBF and try to gracefully replace failed drives as soon as possible.

Honestly, the only people who could offer any insight are the large companies with huge datacenters

Yup, this gives you good insights into the 'current' crop. We've got about 15,000 drives in our Santa Clara data center at Blekko (mostly enterprise SATA, 2TB (WD), but some 1TB (Seagate) too) In large populations like that I prefer to keep one family, which I know folks decry a monoculture but that keeps the failure rate more consistent across all drives which helps manage replacing them.

I have an interest in this and am trying to build up a disk survey system to try and learn about this in the open, it's still not up yet but you can subscribe for an announcement and read some thoughts at http://disksurvey.org/

http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-exper...

Google did some research on this with their datacenters. There is apparently no correlation between heat & diskfailures.

Yes, but google ran all their drives within the specs of the drives (right?). So making sure that your drive is within the specs seems prudent.

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