[ILUG] Hardware queries

[Niall O Broin]

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 09:02:26 +0100 kevin <kevin at cybercolloids.net> wrote:
 
> 1. What manufacturer do people recommend for IDE drives? The
> drive that died was actually one of our newest drives and was a
> Maxtor, the other ones we have are Seagate and Fujitsu. The
> system is not complex, no raid or LVM, just a hard drive with a
> spare backed up by rsync hourly. 40GB would be plenty big
> enough and its not very heavily loaded.

I have to agree with John Looney here. One's as bad as the next, except when
somebody gets it seriously wrong and becomes very much worse e.g. IBM with the
DeathStar series of drives.

If you could get a response from everyone here who has used multiple drives
over time, I'm betting you'd find "I will never use X again" and "I will never
use anything but X again" pretty evenly spread across all values of X.

An old friend of mine uses quite a few drives and he has for the last few
years switched to Maxtor, and hasn't had a failure in the field in years.
However, he burns all his disks with a dedicated disk copying device which is
VERY fussy about drives, to the extent that he has been contacted by Maxtor
engineering to find out how his return rate is so much higher than anyone
else's. This means that he manages to find the dodgy drives very early in
their lives, which is good for him, and his customers.

There is one subscriber to this list who works for an organisation which
suffers hundreds of drive failures a year from a population of multiple
thousands. I'm sure he has good statistics for failure rates across different
manufacturers. I'm even surer that he won't share them :-( (not by his
choice).



Niall