ATA Reliability: Seagate, WD, Maxtor
 

Not to start any heated disputes here, but I'd like to get general
feedback re reliability of the three major brands. I run a few Raid
arrays...Actually Raid 0, so reliability is important.

WD was the first to feature larger buffers, and many started using
them as a result of the p.r. surge. I'm not sure if their quality has
dropped, but I started having reliability problems with them about
a year ago. That was compounded by my experience with WD
tech support. Difficult to reach. Difficult to deal with. Your
experience may vary, of course, but if there *is* a problem it's
nice to have a smooth path to fixing it. So I started using Maxtor.

With regard to support, Maxtor has been much easier to deal with.
Their techs usually take time to track down problems, and they're
not hesitant to escalate to level 2 support when warranted.
But...I've had a few Maxtor failures recently, so... g

I've bought some Seagates in the hope that they're back near
the top (Seagate was *the* name once upon a time). I don't
have any experience with their support yet. I have no idea
how they stack up to WD and Maxtor yet. So I'm hesitant to
invest in a lot of drives until they're proven out.

Any opinions appreciated, especially with regard to Seagate.

_R

"_R" skrev i meddelandet
...
Not to start any heated disputes here, but I'd like to get general
feedback re reliability of the three major brands. I run a few Raid
arrays...Actually Raid 0, so reliability is important.

You value reliability, but you run Raid0? I understand you'd want reliable
drives because of this, but I would never run raid0 and hope the drive
doesn't break. If reliability is truly important, run raid0.

/charles

On Wed, 06 Apr 2005 02:51:06 -0400, _R wrote:

Not to start any heated disputes here, but I'd like to get general
feedback re reliability of the three major brands. I run a few Raid
arrays...Actually Raid 0, so reliability is important.

WD was the first to feature larger buffers, and many started using
them as a result of the p.r. surge. I'm not sure if their quality has
dropped, but I started having reliability problems with them about
a year ago. That was compounded by my experience with WD
tech support. Difficult to reach. Difficult to deal with. Your
experience may vary, of course, but if there *is* a problem it's
nice to have a smooth path to fixing it. So I started using Maxtor.

With regard to support, Maxtor has been much easier to deal with.
Their techs usually take time to track down problems, and they're
not hesitant to escalate to level 2 support when warranted.
But...I've had a few Maxtor failures recently, so... g

I've bought some Seagates in the hope that they're back near
the top (Seagate was *the* name once upon a time). I don't
have any experience with their support yet. I have no idea
how they stack up to WD and Maxtor yet. So I'm hesitant to
invest in a lot of drives until they're proven out.

Any opinions appreciated, especially with regard to Seagate.

_R


As Charles pointed out, raid 0 is "zero raid". So if you've already
started and you're really using raid 0 you're in trouble.

As to ATA reliability, they aren't. That's why most reputable vendors
have maximum raid group sizes or use special parity when usng ATA
drives. Not to say they can't work well for you, just that burning
time and effort on ATA reliability is fruitless IMO. Just buy some
and make sure you've built your raid properly.

~F

In article ,
Faeandar wrote:

As to ATA reliability, they aren't. That's why most reputable vendors

Actually, they *are* fairly reliable.

I'm not sure anyone vendor is better than the others. Also, you left out Hitachi.

have maximum raid group sizes or use special parity when usng ATA
drives. Not to say they can't work well for you, just that burning

Can you name any vendors that has this "maximum group size" and what is it?

time and effort on ATA reliability is fruitless IMO. Just buy some

It's not in mine. But I would choose SATA over ATA because the SATA interface is better (e.g, no master/slave, etc).

On Wed, 06 Apr 2005 14:57:20 GMT, "Charles Morrall"
wrote:


"_R" skrev i meddelandet
.. .
Not to start any heated disputes here, but I'd like to get general
feedback re reliability of the three major brands. I run a few Raid
arrays...Actually Raid 0, so reliability is important.

You value reliability, but you run Raid0? I understand you'd want reliable
drives because of this, but I would never run raid0 and hope the drive
doesn't break. If reliability is truly important, run raid0.

/charles

In a perfect world I could just keep throwing redundant drives at it.
The configuration is necessary given the system constraints.

There are two RAID 0 pairs per box; one for multitrack audio, the
other for handling video. Raid0 was necessary for throughput more
than for volume. They are on 3Ware controllers which I've found
reliable. And unlike the low-end Promise controllers, 3ware is
true raid (separate master channels per drive).

Systems are mirrored, but not in real time. (Slow Raid if you will)
If a bug manages to get through to someone's normal Raid array,
it's toast no matter what the redundancy. With scheduled backups
there is a chance that I could crash and lose data, but also the
chance of a virus taking down the mirror is diminished. It's a
calculated risk.

Anyway, Maybe I should not have emphasized Raid0 as it does
seem to touch a button with some. The rest of the drives in
each system run non-Raid. And when sustained bandwidth
of drives increases, we will drop RAID0.

I'm more interested in reliability of individual drive manufacturers
and models than in Raid0. And there are differences. Even
firmware quality (WD crashes) can enter into it. And as I
pointed out, tech support after the fact is important.

No comments on Seagate, eh?

_R

On Thu, 07 Apr 2005 03:42:44 GMT, flux wrote:

In article ,
Faeandar wrote:

As to ATA reliability, they aren't. That's why most reputable vendors

Actually, they *are* fairly reliable.

I'm not sure anyone vendor is better than the others. Also, you left out Hitachi.

I'm guessing this is for the OP and not me since I'm not sure how I
left out Hitachi.

Fairly reliable is not the same thing. Do you want an airplane that's
fairly reliable? Point is that reliability of ATA is nowhere near
that of Scsi or FC. Once you get down into the desktop class drives
my view on it is rely on raid. Of course that's my view on the high
end too so....
But I also don't care about who makes the high end drives either. If
I have alot of a specific vendor fail then I may start asking my
vendor about it, but otherwise it's just swap and go.


have maximum raid group sizes or use special parity when usng ATA
drives. Not to say they can't work well for you, just that burning

Can you name any vendors that has this "maximum group size" and what is it?

I should have said a recommended maximum raid group size. Nothing
keeps me from shooting myself if I so choose.
NetApp
HDS
HP
IBM

Although in some of the above cases it's SATA and not ATA. But SATA
is slightly more reliable than ATA which is some don't even use ATA at
all.

~F

In article ,
Faeandar wrote:

Fairly reliable is not the same thing.

It's not the same thing as what?

Do you want an airplane that's
fairly reliable?

Yes.

Point is that reliability of ATA is nowhere near
that of Scsi or FC. Once you get down into the desktop class drives

This statement is just fiction. Drives today are roughly the same in reliability, marketing claims notwithstanding.

I should have said a recommended maximum raid group size. Nothing

Which is?

On Fri, 08 Apr 2005 04:11:11 GMT, flux wrote:

In article ,
Faeandar wrote:

Fairly reliable is not the same thing.

It's not the same thing as what?

Not the same as reliable. Fairly reliable != reliable.


Do you want an airplane that's
fairly reliable?

Yes.

Good luck with that. I want one that's very reliable.


Point is that reliability of ATA is nowhere near
that of Scsi or FC. Once you get down into the desktop class drives

This statement is just fiction. Drives today are roughly the same in reliability, marketing claims notwithstanding.

Too many vendors discuss ATA and SATA as tier2 storage for this to be
fiction. Pick a vendor, talk to them about a SATA or ATA array and
see what they say. Also ask them about their failure rates for each
type of drive. 4 vendors I've talked to all say the same thing,
(S)ATA are tier2. Both for reliability and performance.


I should have said a recommended maximum raid group size. Nothing

Which is?

Depends on the vendor. NetApp is 8, HDS is 10 (depending on what
category you get), and I believe IBM is 10 also but can't recall
exactly. A noteworthy point too is that of these only NetApp uses
ATA, the others use SATA.

~F

In article ,
HVB wrote:
...
Generally speaking, ATA and SATA drives are intended for desktop use
and although they may be designed in a similar (or even the same) way,
they are not subjected to the same testing regime or manufacturing
tolerances as Enterprise-class products.
...

No, wrong. Desktop-class drives are DESIGNED radically different from
Enterprise-class drives. This has been true for about a decade. The
last time SCSI and IDE drives were the same underlying drive with just
different interface boards was a long time ago. For the gory detail
of the massive differences between desktop-class and enterprise-class
drives, start by reading: "More than an Interface - SCSI versus ATA",
by Erik Riedel, Jim Dykes, and Dave Anderson, available at a web
search near you.

There is a huge difference in cost, performance characteristics
(tradeoff between capacity and speed), and reliability between
desktop-class and enterprise-class drives. In a nutshell, one could
say: desktop class drives are very cheap, have very high capacity, but
they are slow, and unreliable (both in overall livetime, and also in
their resilience to problems, like they don't like to deal with
vibration). If you look how they are engineered differently (single
combined servo/datapath processor, meaning unable to servo the head
while writing, slower spindles, weaker actuators, fewer air filters,
larger platters, lightweight but weaker frames), this all makes sense.

Little of the difference between desktop-class and enterprise-class
drives is about testing. The story is not that you start with
fundamentally the same drive, and the ones that pass the test get a
SCSI board bolted on and are sold for $$$, while the ones that fail
the test get an ATA board bolted to it and are sold for $.
Internally, the design is radically different.

Now, what is true: While all FC/SCSI drives are enterprise-class
drives, not all ATA/SATA drives are desktop-class drives. About 2
years ago, some manufacturers (names withheld to protect the guilty)
started a trend of selling purported enterprise-class drives with ATA
interfaces. Today, there are quite a few supposedly enterprise-class
drives being sold with SATA interfaces. Unfortunately, I haved talked
to experts in the field (names withheld), which have performed a
teardown analysis on some (but not all!) of these ATA/SATA
enterprise-class drives, and they find that they are built like
desktop-class drives; this was particularly true of the early models.
The following rule of thumb seems to hold in many cases: If something
is nearly as cheap (in $ per byte) as a desktop-class drive, it is
unlikely to be a reliable enterprise-class drive. You do get what you
pay for. If you want a free lunch, look elsewhere.

Now, naturally you can take low-reliability drives, and using
RAID-style techniques built high-reliability disk systems out of them.
The industry has been doing this since the late 70s or early 80s (even
though the buzzword RAID was only coined in 1989). Given the
extremely large capacity of modern drives, and their dropping
reliability (the actual rate of loss of bytes is increasing, because
the capacity is increasing much faster than the reliability), more and
more exotic RAID techniques are required these days (a dumb RAID 5
with a large group, without scrubbing and/or failure prediction is
unlikely to cut it any longer). Whether the building of RAID arrays
by amateurs using off-the-shelf commodity components and inexpensive
disks is a good value, everyone has to determine for themselves,
making a tradeoff between cost of goods, cost of effort for building a
disk system, and value of the data = cost of data loss.

Disclaimer: My employer (which shall remain nameless) does not
manufacture disk drives, but uses many of them, and I do storage
systems for a living. But at home I use a mix of enterprise-class
drives in a RAID configuration (for stuff I care about, like baby
pictures) and cheap drives bought at low-end computer stores (for
stuff downloaded from the net and for backups).

--
The address in the header is invalid for obvious reasons. Please
reconstruct the address from the information below (look for _).
Ralph Becker-Szendy

_R writes:
Not to start any heated disputes here, but I'd like to get general
feedback re reliability of the three major brands. ...
Any opinions appreciated, especially with regard to Seagate.

Yes, there are differences between brands. But those differences
change from week to week. There are often specific models that are
turkeys while other similar models from the same manufacturer are
good. Yes you can buy enterprise drives and get more reliability than
desktop drives, but that's not simply a matter of spending more money
and getting more reliability with no other cost except to your wallet.
The enterprise drives have lower capacity per spindle, need more power
and therefore more cooling, and make more noise. If you unplug a
desktop drive and replace it with an enterprise drive without adding
more cooling, the result can often be LESS reliable than what you had
before.

As for desktop drive reliability, AFAIK the dynamic is something like
this. A manufacturer designs a new type of drive conservatively, but
being a new design it has some bugs so it's not so reliable. Then the
bugs get fixed, so it's more reliable. Then the design enters the
usual cycle, where there's relentless pressure over time to increase
capacity and lower costs. The technology in the design gets pushed
closer and closer to its limits and reliability suffers. Eventually
the drives from that product line become so unreliable that the return
rate becomes unacceptable and also the manufacturer takes a beating in
the marketplace. At that point they have to clean up their act, which
can mean coming up with another design that's technologically newer
than the old one, so it can more conservative again in terms of how
far it presses the technology's capability. The famous IBM/Hitachi
Deskstar (a/k/a Deathstar) debacle went something like this, I think.

Of course none of this is reflected in the marketing crap that the
front office issues. The "New! Hyper-whizbang XYZ" drive can just be
another iteration of the "Old! Bogo-fizzle ABC" drive with a few more
GB and a few cents of cost reduction and less reliability. While the
big engineering change is actually between the "Click-whir 23A-24518"
and the "Click-whir 23A-24519".