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#1
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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 |
#2
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"_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 |
#3
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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 |
#4
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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 |
#5
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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). |
#6
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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 |
#7
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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? |
#8
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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 |
#9
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flux wrote:
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. And drive tech is finicky and rapidly changing, which means you can have a lot of 'duds' from an otherwise reputable brand. You only discover this after a year or so, as resin attcks wires, oil evaporates, bearings crash, heads overheat, or whatnot. Thomas |
#10
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flux writes:
In article , Faeandar wrote: 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. Not to wake up an ancient argument again, but I happened to attend a workshop on storage devices yesterday, and one of the presentations was from Seagate on actual *measured* reliability of desktop vs. enterprise drivers under various loads. (One can argue that Seagate has a vested interest in making more expensive drives look better. Feel free.) They tested 300 drives of two types, SATA and FibreChannel, under 1000 continuous hours of three workloads. (The workloads were derived from measurements in the field.) One workload was typical desktop use; one was high duty cycle, primarily sequential access, as in media streaming; and the third was a server workload, with continuous duty cycle and random accesses. Under desktop workload, the enterprise-class FibreChannel drives were somewhat more reliable than SATA. The measured SATA failure rate was 15% (I'm not sure if that indicated whole drive failures -- it would seem high for that -- or the percentage of drives for which unrecoverable errors were seen during testing.) For enterprise disks, it looked to me from the graph as being around 10%. Under a heavy sequential load, the SATA drives failed roughly twice as often (30%). Under a heavy random load (server workload), 60% of the SATA drives failed in 1000 hours of testing. The failure rate of the FibreChannel drives was pretty much unchanged from the desktop workload, over 6x better reliability. One difference he called out between SATA and FibreChannel disks (or, to be precise, between disks engineered for desktop vs. enterprise applications) is that FibreChannel disks have a temperature sensor on the voice coil. If it gets too hot, the drive will slow down seeks or delay operations altogether to let it cool down. SATA disks have no such sensor (it's a cost factor); they simply assume that they won't overheat (a safe assumption for most desktop use, obviously), and if they get too many long seek requests in a row, they'll overheat and permanently damage the coil. Something else worth noting for RAID advocates.... The uncorrectable error rate on SATA disks is 1 in 10^14 bits. A 500 GB drive has about 1/25 * 10^14 bits. A little arithmetic shows that a 5-disk RAID 5 built of 500 GB SATA disks has a 20% chance of having an unrecoverable read error during reconstruction after a drive failure. For FibreChannel disks, the uncorrectable error rate is 1 in 10^15 bits (they use a longer ECC on the disk, at the expense of capacity). The same RAID built of 500 GB disks will have only a 2% chance of an unrecoverable error during reconstruction. (Also, the disks are generally smaller -- to minimize seek time -- so any single RAID is much more reliable, though you need more to get the same capacity.) More fuel for the fire. Anton |
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