Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2003 14:45:00 -0500 From: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Replacement hard drives, was: Re: Hard error?? Message-ID: <3E4E98BC.700@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <F869P8TIyJMCULSSlTE0001416e@hotmail.com> References: <F869P8TIyJMCULSSlTE0001416e@hotmail.com>
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Henrik W Lund wrote:
[ ... ]
> Anyway, it seems like I have just got to get myself a new drive. On that
> note, has anybody got any idea what I should go for? Any vendors whose
> drives do NOT cave in after half a year? ;)
Your drive should still be under warrantee, then...?
To answer your question: I've been fairly happy with Seagate over the
years, and Maxtor has been okay. Seagate's flagship products tend to do
well, at least if you've got an open budget available-- one main
fileserver I run has four Seagate ST336752LC drives ("Cheetah X15
36LP"?) in a RAID-1,0. They rock. Maxtor has sometimes seemed to have
better price/performance for their normal drives, which is useful when
one's budget it more constrained.
Avoid Quantum at all costs. While there was an educational benefit to
learning how to coax more life from one of those famous 105MB's with
stiction, newer Quantum drives are better in the sense that they hold
more data, and worse in that they tend to fail more abruptly and more
permanently.
IBM and Fujitsu have both been having quality control issues recently,
although the IBM UltraStar lineup used to be pretty good at one point.
I'd also like to give a big thumbs up to recent the Western Digital
series of SE drives with 8MB of cache. WD's previous SCSI drives, like
the 10K 18GB Vantage were good, too.
As for laptop drives, well, what you want is a single platter drive with
low power consumption, hence low heat-- ie, ones for ultra-thin/light
laptops, something like what Sony's got in their VAIO 505's; expect a
slower spindle speed, though. Even so, laptops tend to take a beating,
and even good laptop drives seem to have about a 25% mortality rate
after 3 years, give or take.
Anyone know of a laptop that takes SCA (80-pin SCSI) drives?
Failing that, be nice once SATA + individual IDE channels per drive +
RAID hardware + SCSI layers (TCQ/command protocol/iSCSI/etc) becomes
more common. SATA for the cabling alone will do a world of good. While
I'm thinking about it, a platform-spanning PCI-X version of a SATA/RAID
card would remind me favorably of Adaptec's 2940 (U/UW/OF/etc) series.
-Chuck
Disclaimer: Any Clutch fans out there? Last night's show-- in the
hinterlands of Brooklyn, New York; Lamours-- is responsible; any
opinions represented above I may or may not agree with once I finish
recovering. Very good show, finished very late. :-)
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