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Server hard drives

HMTKSteveHMTKSteve
edited August 2009 in Technology
In the past 6 months two drives have died in my server. One was from Seagate while the other was from Western Digital.

The Seagate has just started to throw read/write errors and I have a spare drive ready to swap out. Who makes the best drives for server use?

Comments

  • George PatchesGeorge Patches
    There is no definitive information that I know of, just completely unfounded personal bias.
  • AprecheApreche
    The more expensive ones are clearly superior.
  • Luke BurrageLuke Burrage
    The more expensive ones are clearly superior.
    I have one for sale for... um... $2000?
  • Dr. TimoDr. Timo
    I have a better one for sale for $4000.
  • AprecheApreche
    The fact is that any drive that gets lots of use, like one in a server, is going to crash sooner rather than later. Make sure you have some sort of RAID, so your site stays up. Also make sure you have another backup, like JungleDisk. Beyond that, you just have to deal with buying new drives.

    Also, you might consider checking the configuration of your server to make sure it isn't unnecessarily using the disk excessively. For example, you might be writing way too many useless log files. Or maybe you have a wiki that is using flat files instead of a database.
  • lackofcheeselackofcheese
    edited August 2009
    Most hard drive manufacturers have normal HDDs, as well as what they call "enterprise-class" HDDs. Sometimes, if you're lucky, they publish some statistics on their drives, but even when they do, the data and methodology remains unpublished anyway... You can look at this article by Intel for a comparison of the two classes of drive. No matter what hard drive you have, though, there's a chance of failure, and better hard drives have a negligible impact on this compared to redundancy and backups. I would only consider enterprise-class drives justified in applications where the cost of the hard drives themselves is vastly outweighed by the potential costs of failure.

    I tend to find The Tech Report has pretty good reviews of hard drives. They can't tell you anything about reliability, since they don't test hard drives by the thousands, but they'll at least give you an indication of performance, and apart from the space/cost ratio that's the only thing that's going to be a real difference between brands. To the vast majority of users, I would simply recommend purchasing whichever drive offers the largest amount of space per dollar. Currently, that's the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB, at $0.08/GB. There were firmware issues with the drive, but it seems that Seagate has fixed them, so despite people whining on the Internet I don't think there's any real basis to avoid it. Currently, Western Digital seems to have some strong offerings in higher-end drives, though:
    Caviar Black (higher-end desktop drive), 1TB @ $0.095/GB, 5-year warranty.
    Datasheet
    Tech Report review
    Caviar RE3 (enterprise-class drive, based on the Caviar Black), 1TB @ $0.155/GB, 5-year warranty.
    Datasheet
    Tech Report review
    You can read up on those drives and decide whether the premium is justified for your purposes.
    Post edited by lackofcheese on
  • George PatchesGeorge Patches
    edited August 2009
    I just got 3 of seagate's new large, low RPM, low heat drives. 1.5TB of space in a RAID 1 comfiguration, can't really complain.
    Post edited by George Patches on
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