I totally agree. I was reading an article the other day that started off by saying how hard drives have come a long way and were so much more reliable than years ago. I stopped reading right there. I've never seen so many drives die as I have in the past 10 years. Before that, drive failures were a rare occurrence. I had always chalked it up to the increase in densities.
-----Original Message----- From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of Ken Cornetet Sent: Monday, May 20, 2013 9:19 PM To: 'ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com' Subject: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? I don't think bulk drives are the issue - I don't think they are going to fail any more often than retail drives. That said, failure and DOA rates for TB range SATA disks are abysmally poor. Drive manufacturers have been locked into a fierce price competition for quite some time, and they are making the drives as absolutely cheaply as possible. One of the expenses they've cut is, apparently, testing. -----Original Message----- From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of Ken Schaefer Sent: Monday, May 20, 2013 8:55 PM To: ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com Subject: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? I'm still with Brian on this. Newegg seems to sell 1TB 7200 RPM drives for ~$70. How much are you saving per drive? $20? (i.e. paying $50) $50 x 100 = $5000. Say three times as many of these fail versus retail (6% vs 2%) then you're talking about 4% of $5000 or $200. How much is your time worth, given you're going to spend xyz hours setting this test up and running it? If my engineer was costing me $100K/year, I wouldn't want them spending time on something like this - surely there'd be more valuable things they could be doing. Cheers Ken -----Original Message----- From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of listserve Sent: Tuesday, 21 May 2013 7:09 AM To: 'ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com' Subject: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? I have a couple of reasons for doing this: 1. These are "bulk" drives, not retail, so I don't trust them as much. I really want to return as many as possible right off the bat, any that might have failed in the first month or two. The price difference between these and retail (or even Newegg) makes this well worth my while, especially since we are purchasing 100. 2. 30 of these are going into our computer lab, where we are very tight for space. We had special flush mounts made so that our Optiplex 745's hang off the back of our tables (not folding tables), saving a lot of desk space. Because of this(and for other reasons), the tables need to screwed to the floor, and some have their backs to the wall, which means everything must be pulled out to get the PC out of the mount. This setup has worked extremely well for us for 1.5 years, and I haven't had to pull out a single PC yet. 3. I'd like to use this same setup in the future to test my server drives before I put them into production. 4. Something else I'm thinking about that I'll elaborate on later... Our current drives are 5-6 year old 80GB and benchmarked at about 50MBps read/write. My new 1TB 7200rpm test drives benched over 100MBps. The difference is noticeable with our aging hardware. We will also be adding RAM, upgrading to Win7, etc. I did the math and we are spending 1/3 to 1/4 the cost of buying new PCs. I will buy a few spare 745's or 755's(they are dirt cheap) in case any die. -----Original Message----- From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of Brian Desmond Sent: Monday, May 20, 2013 2:54 PM To: ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com Subject: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? Is the cost to do this exercise lower than just replacing saying six failed hard drives (given a 5 to 7 percent failure rate) over the next three years? I've never heard of anyone do this - it seems like an awful lot of work for a return I'm having trouble quantifying. Thanks, Brian Desmond br...@briandesmond.com w – 312.625.1438 | c – 312.731.3132 -----Original Message----- From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of listserve Sent: Monday, May 20, 2013 11:55 AM To: 'ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com' Subject: [NTSysADM] What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? I'm going to be ordering about 100 hard drives in the next month or so to upgrade our desktops over the summer. I'd like to be able to put 10(or more) of these at a time in 2 enclosures(5-bays each) I have and run thorough surface scans on them before installing them. (30 of them are going into workstations that are mounted in a computer lab where the drives will be more difficult to remove later) I've used Spinrite for years, and actually got it running in several VMs under hyper-v, using pass-through disks. This works well because I can scan multiple drives at once, which really is necessary since one scan alone can take 50 hours. Spinrite just doesn't get the SMART data while in a VM, but I can do that in the host with a different app. I'm also a little concerned that write-caching in the host could interfere with the accuracy of the surface scan, but have no way to know since this is an unsupported configuration for that app. Do you guys know of any other apps out there similar to Spinrite, that I can hopefully run in the host instead of inside a VM? My main requirement is that I be able to scan multiple disks at once. Any other thoughts on this? Better way to approach it altogether? Thanks, Mike
