[drive failure] tell us which drives have failed on you

[elsegundo]

i've been told by one of my CS teachers to never buy two drives that's of the same production, especially if i want to put those in a raid array. the reason being is that you dont want all of your drives failing at once, and buying them at different productions, even from different companies, can mitigate that risk.
is this still the case?

[Souca]

I've been buying and replacing drives for most of my life and I can say that there isn't a brand who is going to be superior until you get into enterprise class drives. The one thing you should look at is the replacement policy. At one point when I was buying a good deal of drives in bulk I ran into a bad batch from Maxtor. The thing that kept me buying from them was that I got replacements the next day via FedEx along with a mailer to return the defective drive in t he next 30 days. Not sure if they are still doing that as it was about 7 years back. I can't give any particular reason I have for the brand I chose other than warrenty and general trends in platter density and drive offerings. That said, I have never liked Western Digital. Likely there is no real data, but they just feel inferior to me. I liked Quantum until just before Maxtor bought them. Maxtor was good for a while, but then I switched to Hitachi or Seagate depending on the model. Lately I've been using Seagate. Can't comment onthe 1.5 TB for booting as I don't use large drives for the OS, too expensive to mirror; use mine for fraps file storage.

In all this time I have never seen a real head crash. Most drives die due to heat, bearing failure, or electrical component MTBF. I look at hard drives like socks, eventually you should replace them and a little while later they will have holes too big to ignore.

As for buying drives in the same lot for a RAID, if you are hitting the MTBF average for the drives then you have had them in the raid too long and should have had backups Or a service contract; always love when the guys from EMC or other drive companies show up within 30 minutes of a failure. For most home users you aren't going to see a difference IMHO.

- Souca -

[Chorizotarian]

I've run my last 2 computers off dual Raptors in RAID 0, which is basically begging for a fatal hard disk error, and never had a single problem. IMO the quality of Raptors is >>> than most cheap gignormous hard drives. I've had lots of Caviars, etc. fail.