From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Feb 15 11:45: 6 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2BD0937B405 for ; Sat, 15 Feb 2003 11:45:04 -0800 (PST) Received: from pop017.verizon.net (pop017pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.210]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4C88A43FE0 for ; Sat, 15 Feb 2003 11:45:02 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from mac.com ([129.44.41.173]) by pop017.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.05.09 201-253-122-126-109-20020611) with ESMTP id <20030215194501.URIL10203.pop017.verizon.net@mac.com> for ; Sat, 15 Feb 2003 13:45:01 -0600 Message-ID: <3E4E98BC.700@mac.com> Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2003 14:45:00 -0500 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.3b) Gecko/20030210 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Replacement hard drives, was: Re: Hard error?? References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at pop017.verizon.net from [129.44.41.173] at Sat, 15 Feb 2003 13:45:01 -0600 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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. :-) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message