walt wrote:
Bill Hacker wrote:
...IBM-Hitachi are again safe to use...
Hearsay, or personal experience?
Experience. We've had our share of 'Deathstar' - even tracked down one of the
faults that IBM, AFAIK, never published.
Expect to find an ash-pit about 0.020 inches in diameter in the same spot every
time on one of the onboard IC's after a local PS power spike... Or HDD power
cable handling sloppiness/crappy connectors, even...
BUT - we have *also* had many IBM & Hitachi 'Deskstar' run 24 X 7 for five+
years vs a 3 yr warranty. Seagate, OTOH, seems to have perfected the art of
failing the day after the warranty expires (if one is lucky!).
The much-publicized IBM problems were confined to the electronics (above) - used
on many drives, but the electromechanicals and coatings problems applied to a
far narrower range - most of which we missed owning. And they have been fixed
anyway.
At the moment, our preference for 3.5" IDE, in descending order is:
- Western Digital (simply for lower power & less heat)
- Hitachi (cheap and cheerful)
- Maxtor (decent performers, but *very hot*)
And Hitachi (only) for SCSI. At least since CDC sold their bird-farm to
Seagrate...
OTOH, we have decided to buy no more 3.5" HDD *anyway*.
2.5" are now large enough, fast enough, and reasonably well priced enough to
allow us to put the redundant arrays into 1U, and on less power, that we now
need a 2U to hold, power, and cool.
This isn't just 'green' awareness - there is a largish $$ jump in rack rental
per UPS power budget 'chunk', and all our gear is upstream b/w-limited anyway,
not HDD speed/capacity limited.
Bill
