[Discuss] Tired of unreliable external drives... recommendations?

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 9:42 AM, Edward Ned Harvey <blu at nedharvey.com> wrote:
>...
> As an IT guy and Computer Engineer, and EE, working for CS/EE / chip
> companies, I encourage companies to stick with big name brands where they've
> sold millions of the same drive under warranty (such as ... buy your Dell
> and Apple and Oracle branded drives rather than OTS
> seagate/westerndigital/etc drives.)  But it's all just a superstition and a
> balance of probabilities, and in fact, buying the supported name branded
> drives does indeed cost more per drive.

None of the companies you recommend make their own disk drives.   In
fact, they all resell drives from the companies that you don't
recommend.   Now, I can remember a time when Sun (for example) had
particular firmware revisions that they used for drives they resold.
This would in fact make them different from the same model disk drive
that I can purchase from NewEgg, etc.   Can you clarify what
differences you believe still exist between branded and OTS drives
when we are talking about the exact same model?  Or are you simply
saying to stay away away from models targeted at home users rather
then only buying through whole system branded channels?

>...
> If I buy the Dell/Oracle drives, I know I will have the opportunity to
> extend the warranty after 3 yrs if I care to.  With apple, it's not an
> option.  With commodity OTS drives, it's also not an option.  So in the
> former case, I buy just how many I need, and with the latter case, I
> pre-stock twice as many drives because I know 3 yrs from now, these things
> won't be for sale anymore.  So ... If the commodity OTS drives cost half as
> much as the big-name-branded drives and I buy twice as many of them ... It's
> basically a wash.

Except that the replacement waiting period is the 5 minutes it takes
to pull the commodity OTS drive out of the closet as opposed to
overnight or at best 4 hour dispatch (if you have a pay through the
nose support contract).  Or you can populate your drive arrays with
hot spares, run RAID6 rather then RAID5, or ZFS with more replication.
  Plus you have more drives to resell/repurpose (a plus) or trash (a
minus) when the inevitable forklift upgrade occurs.

Bill Bogstad