[Gllug] recommendation for external hard drive

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

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.


>   I pick drives based on price, availability, and length of warranty
>  period.  I think thats about the best you can do.  Any blanket
>  statement about specific manufacturers is almost certainly naive
>  at best, or outright wrong.
>
>   
Well there's very little to separate drives on price and availability,
most manufacturers are within a few quid of each other and availability
is generally very high so your left with warranty. This is why I've
traditionally recommended Seagate, their 5 year warranty, it shows they
have some faith in their product and that extra two years is a lot of
additional value for devices that traditionally like to start failing
after 3 years.


>> Also bear in mind they're inherently flaky devices, even the good ones
>> can pop at the drop of a hat. Whenever I think about the engineering
>> stresses and tolerances involved I'm surprised they work at all!
>>     
>
>   See what I mean?
>   

Not really, that doesn't imply all manufacturers are equal :/ Somebody
IS best, somebody else IS worst at any given time, the question is how
large a margin is there between best and worst and are those positions
usefully stable or do they change too fast and by too much to bother
with. As I said, without a large study all we can do is speculate, feel
free to ignore that :)

Roger.
> Steve
> --
> Debian GNU/Linux System Administration
> http://www.debian-administration.org/
>
>   

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