[Gllug] recommendation for external hard drive

[sean]

general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
> Steve Kemp wrote:
>   
>> On Wed Oct 21, 2009 at 17:19:33 +0100, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
>>
>>   
>>     
>>> I have heard of people who never have problems with Maxtor but I have
>>> had nothing BUT problems with them. They once delivered 5 pallets of
>>> Dell machines with Maxtor drives to my workplace and within a week of
>>> beginning to install them we had to arrange to return the whole lot
>>> because the out of the box fail rate was so high.
>>>     
>>>       
>>   This is the main problem with all anecdotal stories about drive
>>  failures.  Over time 99% of drives will fail.  Regardless of model,
>>  size, or source.
>>
>>   Ten people see failures in a maxtor drive and immediately scream
>>  "maxtor suck".  Ten other people see failures in Seagate drives and
>>  scream "seagate suck".
>>   
>>     
>
> I agree but when it comes to Maxtor there's no smoke without fire.
> Individually my experiences might not be very representative but
> whenever this subject comes up it turns out there's a lot of others
> who've noted the same thing about them. Also, somebody's got to be
> bottom of the pile, I'd say it's a good bet it's them.
>
> Google did a study contrasting actual failure rates and stated MTBF a
> few years back so they know who this is (or was back then) but they
> considered it impolitic to name and shame them, which is a pity as it
> could end this argument in one fell swoop. Maybe the difference in
> reliability between manufacturers is negligible but we have no way of
> knowing without doing a similarly huge study. In the mean time all we
> have to talk about is our own experiences.
>
>
>   

google study, but as stated no naming and shaming:
http://usenix.com/events/fast07/tech/full_papers/pinheiro/pinheiro_html/index.html

bbc interprets the study:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6376021.stm

a paper which raises concerns about mttf:
http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html

http://www.storagereview.com/ used to have a user reliability database, 
but it always seemed out of date and i'm not sure if the number of 
drives would meet with a statistician's approval.


there used to be a web site where an individual was collecting failure 
statistics and providing vendor based graphs, but it was threatened with 
legal action and discontinued the survey 3ish years ago. i remember that 
the best vendor at that time was samsung, with hitachi second, and none 
of the samsung drives i've been buying since then have failed. i think 
maxtor were bottom, but i had more interest in what was top, so i could 
be wrong.
it would be useful to have real current evidence. google do have that, 
but won't release it. they would probably purchase the majority of their 
drives from whichever vendor is is top of their list, so that might be a 
clue.

regards

sean

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