computer components & hardware - are SATA drives cooler to the touch than IDE?

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are SATA drives cooler to the touch than IDE?

I need to buy some drives for a company server, to be used in a RAID
configuration. I'm used to buying SCSI drives, because I love 1) that
they feel cool to the touch when running and 2) they have a high "mean time
between failure" number (MTBF). I just hate the price of SCSI drives and
this is for a small business.

Now, I see that SATA drives have a good MTBF number comparable to SCSI. So
I'm thinking of buying the Maxtor 9 or 10 series SATA drives or the WD
Raptors that spin at 10k. They all have MTBF numbers like SCSI drives but
can someone tell me how cool or hot they are to the touch?

If an IDE (regular ATA) drive runs warm/hot, and a SCSI drive in the same
enclosure runs cool, where does SATA fall? Does anyone know from
experience touching these drives while they're running?

AFN wrote:
I need to buy some drives for a company server, to be used in a RAID
configuration. I'm used to buying SCSI drives, because I love 1)
that they feel cool to the touch when running and 2) they have a high
"mean time between failure" number (MTBF). I just hate the price
of SCSI drives and this is for a small business.

Now, I see that SATA drives have a good MTBF number comparable to
SCSI. So I'm thinking of buying the Maxtor 9 or 10 series SATA
drives or the WD Raptors that spin at 10k. They all have MTBF
numbers like SCSI drives but can someone tell me how cool or hot they
are to the touch?

If an IDE (regular ATA) drive runs warm/hot, and a SCSI drive in the
same enclosure runs cool, where does SATA fall? Does anyone know
from experience touching these drives while they're running?

They might be the most reliable drives on the planet these days, but once
bitten...and these days I steer clear of Crapster - I've yet to see one last
longer than four or five months. I have three WD Raptors in my system and
they are surprisingly cool - in fact I'd go as far as to say cold and
relatively quiet.
--
My great-grandfather was born and raised in Elgin - did he eventually
lose his marbles?

"Miss Perspicacia Tick" wrote in message
...
AFN wrote:
I need to buy some drives for a company server, to be used in a RAID
configuration. I'm used to buying SCSI drives, because I love 1)
that they feel cool to the touch when running and 2) they have a high
"mean time between failure" number (MTBF). I just hate the price
of SCSI drives and this is for a small business.

Now, I see that SATA drives have a good MTBF number comparable to
SCSI. So I'm thinking of buying the Maxtor 9 or 10 series SATA
drives or the WD Raptors that spin at 10k. They all have MTBF
numbers like SCSI drives but can someone tell me how cool or hot they
are to the touch?

If an IDE (regular ATA) drive runs warm/hot, and a SCSI drive in the
same enclosure runs cool, where does SATA fall? Does anyone know
from experience touching these drives while they're running?

They might be the most reliable drives on the planet these days, but once
bitten...and these days I steer clear of Crapster - I've yet to see one
last
longer than four or five months. I have three WD Raptors in my system and
they are surprisingly cool - in fact I'd go as far as to say cold and
relatively quiet.
--
My great-grandfather was born and raised in Elgin - did he eventually
lose his marbles?

Thanks for the reply. Is there anything unusual about the Raptors in your
case that might have made them crash (like you live in humid Hawaii or a hot
desert without A/C)? Could you tell me how many Raptors you've had and how
many of those have had true mechanical (really not working) problems?

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:51:17 +0000, AFN wrote:

I need to buy some drives for a company server, to be used in a RAID
configuration. I'm used to buying SCSI drives, because I love 1) that
they feel cool to the touch when running and 2) they have a high "mean time
between failure" number (MTBF). I just hate the price of SCSI drives and
this is for a small business.

Now, I see that SATA drives have a good MTBF number comparable to SCSI. So
I'm thinking of buying the Maxtor 9 or 10 series SATA drives or the WD
Raptors that spin at 10k. They all have MTBF numbers like SCSI drives but
can someone tell me how cool or hot they are to the touch?

If an IDE (regular ATA) drive runs warm/hot, and a SCSI drive in the same
enclosure runs cool, where does SATA fall? Does anyone know from
experience touching these drives while they're running?

SATA and ATA drives are exactly the same drives except for the interface
so they will run at the same temperature. I'd suggest using Seagate
drives, I've found them to be very reliable. Avoid Maxtor, they are the
least reliable drives on the planet. The highest performance SATA
7200RPM drives right now are the Hitachi (formerly IBM) drives. IBM had a
terrible reliablity problem a couple of years ago, I don't know how they
are doing now. The best place to look for informantion on drive
performance, including temperature and noise, is at
http://www.storagereview.com.

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:51:17 GMT, "AFN"
wrote:

I need to buy some drives for a company server, to be used in a RAID
configuration. I'm used to buying SCSI drives, because I love 1) that
they feel cool to the touch when running and 2) they have a high "mean time
between failure" number (MTBF). I just hate the price of SCSI drives and
this is for a small business.

Now, I see that SATA drives have a good MTBF number comparable to SCSI. So
I'm thinking of buying the Maxtor 9 or 10 series SATA drives or the WD
Raptors that spin at 10k. They all have MTBF numbers like SCSI drives but
can someone tell me how cool or hot they are to the touch?

If an IDE (regular ATA) drive runs warm/hot, and a SCSI drive in the same
enclosure runs cool, where does SATA fall? Does anyone know from
experience touching these drives while they're running?

Maxtors may or may not be "unreliable" as these posts say , the
posters obviously had bad experiences with them but as people have
posted , virtually evey brand gets bashed by someone. Doing a search
below ---- a user claims the familiar story about how IBMs went
bellyup. But then he says he and his friend experienced a rash of bad
Seagates in a short time.

A poster after this guy at the same site claims he ran into Hitachi
failures in a short while.

I dont have access to the manufacturers warranty service rates but I
havent had any problems like hardware crashes etc yet and Ive bought a
fair amount of them.

Heres just a sample of posts you can find on the net and I left out
the ones bashing Maxtor since its been bashed already in this thread :

-----------------------------------------------------

Abyss

Not sure if its just me who has lousy experience but as the prices of
HDD's drop so do their reliability it seems. Whilst I can appreciate
that based on the price of a typical 60 or 80GB drive they are being
referred to as consumables, I seem to note that every major
manufacturer seems to have their ups and down in terms of reliability
and bad batches.

One moment Seagate is considered to have the fastest or most reliable
drives, then there's a bad batch and they drop down, and then its
Maxtor, IBM/Hitachi etc. (note just examples)

I've been brand jumping for quite a while, had IBM 60GB drives in May
2001 and they all failed in the 13month. I read there had been a bad
batch so I moved away from IBM. Then I was using Seagate in various
sizes and various flavours, now they seem to be failing again the 13th
month. Not just my own drives but those of family, friends and ppl who
bring me their machines for fixing!

I then heard oh well thats coz you aren't using Maxtor, they may be
slow but they are reliable......etc etc. Now I'm hearing that Western
Digital are back in the game and so far haven't heard any bad stories
yet. I've got a WD Raptor which I'm happy to see has a 5yr warranty so
I hope I won't be upset.

But I guess what I'm curious to know, is that whilst THG may have
review on drives, very little is said about reliability. Was wondering
if there was any chance of sticky poll being placed listing the major
manufacturers, say split into SATA and IDE that would allow forum
users to post their personal experience and give others a reliability
idea.

Everyone seems to have their own favourite and I heard horror stories
about just about every manufacturer's drives, some can be correlated,
others can't. Still I think as drive rpms increase, and platters get
bigger, it seems the elctro-mechanical devices that are becoming
cheaper and cheaper and also becoming EXTREMELY
unreliable.......almost engineered to fail in the 13month and that's
if they don't fail earlier, albeit under warranty.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
At Sudhian

I have to disagree with your reliability rankings. Western Digital is
hardly reliable, and Hitachi's drives have been well above average.
Samsung has proven to be very reliable (if underperforming) while
Seagate has slipped considerably.

I only hope that Seagate will tighten up their quality control to meet
their longer warranties.

Older Seagate drives are quite solid. Newer models are questionable.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Webhost Talk

I have a lot of seagate and maxtor drives in 24H alive systems. Here
are my conclusions:

Maxtor are more reliable (although Seagate is reliable enough)

Maxtor are faster.

Maxtor have a higher capacity after format than Seagate.

Maxtor are more quiet.

Western Digital Sucks for reliability.

Ric.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Personally, I've used the following hard drives: IBM, WD, Maxtor,
Samsung (mostly Maxtors and WDs).

Out of those, I found Maxtors to be the more reliable. I had, out of
about 4 WD hard drives, 3 start making clicking noises and its access
time became really slow... to the point it took about 15 minutes or so
to boot up Windows when it usually took a minute.

All three of the drives, believe it or not, had this problem 1-3
months after the 2 year warranty period. This is one reason why I
stopped purchasing WD hard drives couple years back. Even if I saw
them really cheap, I waited for the Maxtor HD deals.

Am going through at least 6 Maxtor's now (and about to purchase
another), haven't had much of a problem with any of them. (maybe I
just jinxed myself here )

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hitachi/IBM's have been performing well. The WD's actually have the
highest failure rate for us as it stands.

__________________

Seagate is my vote of the three.

Samsung - never had a single failure. They've started making higher
end drives too, which is great.

Western Digital - their failure rate is well over 50% in a server
environment (from the past 4 years of experience). At least, with the
non-8 MB Cache series. We stopped using them before their 8 MB Cache
series came out.

I've had great success with Hitachi as well. IBM drives back in the
day were horrible, I'm glad they got out of the business. Hitachi has
increased quality significantly.

-----------------------------------------------------

From experience I have seen that Seagates fail more than Maxtors.
Haven't had much experience with the others, only heard comments. My
vote goes for Maxtor.

__________________

" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:51:17 GMT, "AFN"
wrote:

I need to buy some drives for a company server, to be used in a RAID
configuration. I'm used to buying SCSI drives, because I love 1) that
they feel cool to the touch when running and 2) they have a high "mean
time
between failure" number (MTBF). I just hate the price of SCSI drives
and
this is for a small business.

Now, I see that SATA drives have a good MTBF number comparable to SCSI.
So
I'm thinking of buying the Maxtor 9 or 10 series SATA drives or the WD
Raptors that spin at 10k. They all have MTBF numbers like SCSI drives
but
can someone tell me how cool or hot they are to the touch?

If an IDE (regular ATA) drive runs warm/hot, and a SCSI drive in the
same
enclosure runs cool, where does SATA fall? Does anyone know from
experience touching these drives while they're running?

Maxtors may or may not be "unreliable" as these posts say , the
posters obviously had bad experiences with them but as people have
posted , virtually evey brand gets bashed by someone. Doing a search
below ---- a user claims the familiar story about how IBMs went
bellyup. But then he says he and his friend experienced a rash of bad
Seagates in a short time.

A poster after this guy at the same site claims he ran into Hitachi
failures in a short while.

I dont have access to the manufacturers warranty service rates but I
havent had any problems like hardware crashes etc yet and Ive bought a
fair amount of them.

Heres just a sample of posts you can find on the net and I left out
the ones bashing Maxtor since its been bashed already in this thread :

-----------------------------------------------------

Abyss

Not sure if its just me who has lousy experience but as the prices of
HDD's drop so do their reliability it seems. Whilst I can appreciate
that based on the price of a typical 60 or 80GB drive they are being
referred to as consumables, I seem to note that every major
manufacturer seems to have their ups and down in terms of reliability
and bad batches.

One moment Seagate is considered to have the fastest or most reliable
drives, then there's a bad batch and they drop down, and then its
Maxtor, IBM/Hitachi etc. (note just examples)

I've been brand jumping for quite a while, had IBM 60GB drives in May
2001 and they all failed in the 13month. I read there had been a bad
batch so I moved away from IBM. Then I was using Seagate in various
sizes and various flavours, now they seem to be failing again the 13th
month. Not just my own drives but those of family, friends and ppl who
bring me their machines for fixing!

I then heard oh well thats coz you aren't using Maxtor, they may be
slow but they are reliable......etc etc. Now I'm hearing that Western
Digital are back in the game and so far haven't heard any bad stories
yet. I've got a WD Raptor which I'm happy to see has a 5yr warranty so
I hope I won't be upset.

But I guess what I'm curious to know, is that whilst THG may have
review on drives, very little is said about reliability. Was wondering
if there was any chance of sticky poll being placed listing the major
manufacturers, say split into SATA and IDE that would allow forum
users to post their personal experience and give others a reliability
idea.

Everyone seems to have their own favourite and I heard horror stories
about just about every manufacturer's drives, some can be correlated,
others can't. Still I think as drive rpms increase, and platters get
bigger, it seems the elctro-mechanical devices that are becoming
cheaper and cheaper and also becoming EXTREMELY
unreliable.......almost engineered to fail in the 13month and that's
if they don't fail earlier, albeit under warranty.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
At Sudhian

I have to disagree with your reliability rankings. Western Digital is
hardly reliable, and Hitachi's drives have been well above average.
Samsung has proven to be very reliable (if underperforming) while
Seagate has slipped considerably.

I only hope that Seagate will tighten up their quality control to meet
their longer warranties.

Older Seagate drives are quite solid. Newer models are questionable.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Webhost Talk

I have a lot of seagate and maxtor drives in 24H alive systems. Here
are my conclusions:

Maxtor are more reliable (although Seagate is reliable enough)

Maxtor are faster.

Maxtor have a higher capacity after format than Seagate.

Maxtor are more quiet.

Western Digital Sucks for reliability.

Ric.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Personally, I've used the following hard drives: IBM, WD, Maxtor,
Samsung (mostly Maxtors and WDs).

Out of those, I found Maxtors to be the more reliable. I had, out of
about 4 WD hard drives, 3 start making clicking noises and its access
time became really slow... to the point it took about 15 minutes or so
to boot up Windows when it usually took a minute.

All three of the drives, believe it or not, had this problem 1-3
months after the 2 year warranty period. This is one reason why I
stopped purchasing WD hard drives couple years back. Even if I saw
them really cheap, I waited for the Maxtor HD deals.

Am going through at least 6 Maxtor's now (and about to purchase
another), haven't had much of a problem with any of them. (maybe I
just jinxed myself here )

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----

Hitachi/IBM's have been performing well. The WD's actually have the
highest failure rate for us as it stands.

__________________

Seagate is my vote of the three.

Samsung - never had a single failure. They've started making higher
end drives too, which is great.

Western Digital - their failure rate is well over 50% in a server
environment (from the past 4 years of experience). At least, with the
non-8 MB Cache series. We stopped using them before their 8 MB Cache
series came out.

I've had great success with Hitachi as well. IBM drives back in the
day were horrible, I'm glad they got out of the business. Hitachi has
increased quality significantly.

-----------------------------------------------------

From experience I have seen that Seagates fail more than Maxtors.
Haven't had much experience with the others, only heard comments. My
vote goes for Maxtor.

__________________

yeah, i've gone from brand to brand and you're right. certainly specific
brands and models may have problems when they do stupid things from time to
time, but now i just look at the warranty, which sometimes tells you what
they really know about how long it will last ( even though I wouldnt bother
to send it in for warranty work ).

that's what i wrote my original post more about the general drive types and
i wasn't really meaning for this threat to turn into a specific brand/model
debate.

"General Schvantzkoph" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:51:17 +0000, AFN wrote:

I need to buy some drives for a company server, to be used in a RAID
configuration. I'm used to buying SCSI drives, because I love 1) that
they feel cool to the touch when running and 2) they have a high "mean
time
between failure" number (MTBF). I just hate the price of SCSI drives
and
this is for a small business.

Now, I see that SATA drives have a good MTBF number comparable to SCSI.
So
I'm thinking of buying the Maxtor 9 or 10 series SATA drives or the WD
Raptors that spin at 10k. They all have MTBF numbers like SCSI drives
but
can someone tell me how cool or hot they are to the touch?

If an IDE (regular ATA) drive runs warm/hot, and a SCSI drive in the
same
enclosure runs cool, where does SATA fall? Does anyone know from
experience touching these drives while they're running?

SATA and ATA drives are exactly the same drives except for the interface
so they will run at the same temperature. I'd suggest using Seagate
drives, I've found them to be very reliable. Avoid Maxtor, they are the
least reliable drives on the planet. The highest performance SATA
7200RPM drives right now are the Hitachi (formerly IBM) drives. IBM had a
terrible reliablity problem a couple of years ago, I don't know how they
are doing now. The best place to look for informantion on drive
performance, including temperature and noise, is at
http://www.storagereview.com.

I don't believe that the SATA drives are the same as regular IDE/ATA. They
boast double the MTBF numbers, comparable to SCSI. I'm not an expert, and
I'm inviting debate, but I believe you're wrong to say they are the same
except for the interface. Surely some components inside must be different
if the MTBF numbers is double (and comparable to SCSI).

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 23:48:29 GMT, "AFN"
wrote:

I don't believe that the SATA drives are the same as regular IDE/ATA. They
boast double the MTBF numbers, comparable to SCSI. I'm not an expert, and
I'm inviting debate, but I believe you're wrong to say they are the same
except for the interface. Surely some components inside must be different
if the MTBF numbers is double (and comparable to SCSI).

Often SCSI drives are expected to run for longer interval in
a server. With an expectation for fewer spinups per
operational hour than a desktop system it wouldn't be
surprising that their MTBF rate is higher.

but then why would SATA also have the higher MTBF? I really think that
there's a difference but hopefully someone knows better than me.

"kony" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 23:48:29 GMT, "AFN"
wrote:

I don't believe that the SATA drives are the same as regular IDE/ATA.
They
boast double the MTBF numbers, comparable to SCSI. I'm not an expert,
and
I'm inviting debate, but I believe you're wrong to say they are the same
except for the interface. Surely some components inside must be
different
if the MTBF numbers is double (and comparable to SCSI).

Often SCSI drives are expected to run for longer interval in
a server. With an expectation for fewer spinups per
operational hour than a desktop system it wouldn't be
surprising that their MTBF rate is higher.