[sclug] Seagate ST3300831A-RK Barracuda 300GB 7200RPM disk

[Alex Butcher]

On Sat, 4 Mar 2006, John Stumbles wrote:

> I've been looking for a bigger HDD and just seen that ebuyer are doing these 
> for 70 quid which is the best price/capacity I've seen.
>
> Seagate ST3300831A-RK Barracuda 300GB 7200RPM
>
> http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2VsZWN0X3Byb2R1Y3Rfb3ZlcnZpZXc=&product_uid=81597
>
> Are Seagates any good though? groups.google didn't throw up any horror 
> stories but maybe some folks here have Deeper Clue.

Current Seagates are as good as anyone else's and better than some (e.g.
Maxtor). The only certain thing about HDD vendors and quality/reliability is
that each manufacturer goes through phases of superb reliability and rotten
reliability. I've heard it put that there's only enough good HDD engineers
for one complete team at any given time. :-)

I've had a couple of 200G Seagate ST3200822A models running in a "RAID0.5"
(i.e. two partitions RAID0'ed, and two more RAID1'ed, each then hosting LVM
Physical Volumes, which then each have filesystems within Logical Volumes -
depending on the contents of each filesystem, it's allocated to the RAID0 PV
or the RAID1 PV) for about 18 months with no serious problems.

The only thing I have found is that sometimes when running the long SMART
test, a block gets marked as failed, but this seems to only occur to files
under /var/log, making me thing the test in the firmware is a bit buggy in
dealing with blocks that are being written two whilst the test is in
progress.

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x5010dbff                         <http://www.assursys.com/>