[Gllug] recommendation for external hard drive

[Hari Sekhon]

Bernard Peek wrote:
> sean wrote:
>   
>>  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.
>>     
>
> To me it seems self-evident that none of these studies are going to 
> provide the data needed for a sensible comparison. For even the worst 
> drives MTTF is substantially longer than the lifetime of the product. By 
> the time you have collected sufficient evidence to make a judgement 
> about a product it has been superseded and it's too late to take any 
> action on the findings. I remember the IBM "Deathstar" range was off the 
> market before there was much noise about the problem, and the production 
> company was sold off.
>
>   
I read a couple years ago that Google ran their infrastructure of 
servers with a single non-raided 80GB Maxtor in there, simply to be as 
cheap as possible because it didn't matter if the system failed, their 
proprietary layer on top deals with the resilience across large numbers 
of nodes.

If that's true, then I'm not sure buying the same drives they buy would 
be beneficial?

-h

-- 
Hari Sekhon
http://www.linkedin.com/in/harisekhon

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