[Discuss] Striping is bad

[ward at pong.be (Ward Vandewege)]

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 10:45:45PM -0500, markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
> I will assert that Hitachi drives are poor quality, I've had a 2 year 50%
> failure rate in my experience. I have had 4 Samsung drives in roughly
> equivalent conditions for a little longer and have had zero defects. I've
> had one, and only one, western digital disk die on me in two decades, and
> that was because it was in a USB enclosure that got knocked to the floor
> while it was on.

Even within a brand, there are spectacular differences between models of
drives - and even between batches of the same model of drive.

Take, for instance, the 65 Western Digital RE4 2TB enterprise drives
(WD2002FYPS) I took in production about 2 years ago. So far I've got a
failure rate approaching 30% - and most of those died after very light use.

I've seen nothing like this with other WD models, and I've used quite a few
over the years.

Six months ago I installed 55 Hitachi 3TB drives (HDS5C3030ALA630). I have
yet to see a single one of them fail. The backblaze guys also have great
things to say about this model:

http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/

Should I now conclude that all WD drives are completely unreliable and that
all Hitachi drives are awesome? 

Of course not. I keep track of other people's experience with certain models
of drives, but always take those accounts with a grain of salt - as someone
else said in this thread, it is all anecdotal information. 

Most people do not have a sample size that is large enough to draw any
meaningful conclusions from. And even when someone does have a large pool of
installed drives, how would I know that the batch of drives I buy will be of
the same quality as the one they have?

So I select drives mostly based on length of warranty, accept that drive
failures are a fact of life, and RMA drives when necessary. And I avoid using
anything more fancy than RAID 1 - it's too easy to get burned by failing
drives otherwise.

Thanks,
Ward.

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