Tet's Journal: Hard drives

Time for more storage. Where's the current sweet spot? It looks like drives are considerably more expensive than I was expecting. I'm guessing that's still a hangover from the flooding in the Far East. I'm considering a Samsung HD204UI or a Seagate ST2000DL003. Both are 2TB, which is about right for what I need. Both are slow (5400 and 5900 rpm respectively). That's OK. I/O performance is not the bottleneck here. That said, I'd rather have a bit quicker, but going up to 7200 rpm adds significant extra expenditure.

I'm way out of touch with PC hardware standards. The Seagate is nominally SATA III (a misnomer, IIRC). Will that be backwardly compatible with my SATA I/II controllers, or will I need to upgrade those as well? Any other suggestions on models I should be looking at, or things I should be considering?

Don't talk me about harddisks

[jawtheshark]

Thursday I had two failures. A Seagate 2TB disk on willekens.lu which took down a RAID5 (shouldn't it handle that... *grmbl*) and a Toshiba on jawtheshark.com. Yes, both my servers decided to die the same day. Geez.. Both are still within warranty, and I will send them back. My impression is that disk quality is down, and these disks were pre-flood.

Also, yay for nightly backups!

Anyway, as it happens I also have built my future jawtheshark.com and it features SATA3 ports... SATA2 disks work just fine o

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[Tet]

Disks are insanely expensive right now

Yes, I'd noticed :-( I can hold out for a little while, but not too much longer. I've already shuffled around the free space I have, but I'm running dangerously low on a couple of filesystems.

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[jawtheshark]

I see... Still, be very wary of current disks... In the last 4 months, I had four disks fail: my own work laptop disk, a coworkers desktop disk, and the two above mentioned disks just last week. That excluding those in the backup disk array at work (which does have its age). I haven't seen this level of failures ever since the 160GB days, where I had disks fail a mere three months after purchase.

I'd suggest to buy everything double and backup, backup, backup... However with the current prices, buying eve

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[Barbara, not Barbie]

... and avoid Seagate ... their plants were the ones most affected by the flooding, and they weren't so hot before the Great Flood.

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[jawtheshark]

This means avoid Samsung too as they are now part of Seagate. Maxtor also is Seagate, and was terrible.

Hitachi of Deathstar fame (currently seems the best choice)

There is nothing I trust anymore.

Re:

[Barbara, not Barbie]

There is nothing I trust anymore.

It's funny - one of the points of mass manufacturing was that every item was supposed to be interchangeable with any other one on the same line - but they're not. Two identical drives, same day, one can be DOA and another one work for years.