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

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

Daniel Barrett wrote:
> In the past year or two, however, all of the large external HD's I've tried
> (3TB) develop errors or die within the first year.
> 
> At the same time, I read reviews on NewEgg of large external drives and
> they are filled with negatives.

Hasn't your NewEgg observation applied for quite a few years (3+)? Isn't
this the norm for the highest capacity drives? To get a clear picture
you need to do a bit of filtering: look at only the most recent 6 months
(or maybe 3), as firmware updates can make a difference, and filter out
all the negative reviews from people who can't get hardware to work with
Windows and other obvious operator errors.

It would be interesting to get an expert's opinion on this, backed up
with some long term statistics, to see if drive reliability, at the
higher capacities, is in fact trailing off.

We could, for example, be approaching a point in the current drive
technology where hitting the next capacity benchmark is involving
greater and greater risks. If you plotted out reliability versus
capacity I expect you'd see something like a set of chained bell curves,
where reliability would dip at the transition points where one
technology was hitting its limits and the next technology was being
figured out.


> 1. Are there ANY reliable, quiet, external drives of size >= 3TB today,
> that fit into a safety deposit box (i.e., no RAID appliances) and work with
> Linux?

In addition to the previously posted good suggestions for various ways
in software of adding error correction and redundancy to your single
drive, I'd suggest trying some lower capacity drives, which you may find
to be more stable, and bundle them in a JBOD. Can can find fairly
inexpensive 2-bay USB or eSATA enclosures. (I'll second the
recommendation to use eSATA over USB if you can.)


> (Quiet is important.)

If it is a backup drive, add some code to your backup script to spin
up/down the drive. Then upgrade the enclosure's fan to one that is
temperature controlled.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/