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List:       gentoo-user
Subject:    Re: [gentoo-user] hp H222 SAS controller
From:       Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo () gmail ! com>
Date:       2013-07-15 15:39:37
Message-ID: CAEH5T2MXxM7jDUoD5dbvNwYyQbvHyGP=tZigkg7PbmrRzXDc9w () mail ! gmail ! com
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On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 2:39 AM, Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been watching this thread with interest, because I've been trying to find
> out which HDD I should be buying for a new PC.  For every person reporting
> problematic Seagates there's another person complaining about Western Digital
> being too noisy, failing, or in the case of the black versions, far too
> expensive.
>
> Amidst all the anecdotal aphorisms against one or the other manufacturer, I
> saw mentioned that the likelihood of failure doubles up when you go from 1TB
> to 2 TB.  If true, I guess that the 3TB would have fewer failures than 4TB
> drive.
>
> For what it's worth I have had a number of Seagates failing on me, but since
> this was in the 90's.  On my laptop a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 (ST9500420ASG)
> is running fine for the last 3.5 years so, I was thinking of taking a punt on
> a 'Seagate Barracuda 3.5 inch 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB 6GB/S Internal SATA'.  But
> what you're mentioning here gives me cause to pause.

One important thing to know is that there are only 3 HDD manufacturers
remaining: Seagate, WD and Toshiba. Any other brand names you see are
just relabeled versions of those. Maxtor/IBM/Hitachi/Fujitsu/Samsung
and all those who came before them are gone.

My personal preference the last several years was always Samsung, I
never had a single problem with one of those. Unfortunately they are
no longer in the HDD business...

In general, for 3.5" drives, I think "NAS" or "RAID" or "Enterprise"
branded drives tend to be more expensive, but of a higher quality and
rated to run in 24/7 environments. Even if you're not using it that
way, it suggests that it's a more rugged drive. The "Personal",
"Desktop", "Budget" etc. and drives that come in external enclosures
tend to be a roll of the dice. Some have speculated that the HDDs
which score lower on quality assurance tests get stuck into these
lower-priced lines (kind of like CPU binning).

The Seagate "Desktop 4TB" drives I got for $140 have extremely
aggressive power-saving and spin-down (sometimes it takes 10 seconds
just to access the drive after it spins down!). They are 5400rpm, but
that is unadvertised and some people claim to have received 7200rpm.
The specs on lifetime are pretty poor. I read that they are only rated
for something like 200 days of cumulative use. But I expected it to at
least work for a week! I keep running passes of badblocks and it keeps
finding new bad sectors that weren't there the previous time I ran it.
It is literally degrading before my very eyes. I have zero trust in
it.

For 2.5" hard drives, I have seen many, many crashed 2.5" drives from
every brand, but never had one fail on me personally. I've always
attributed it to human influence, people tend to be rough on laptops,
tossing them onto the table, dropping them, leaving them in a hot or
freezing cold car, etc. Also the nature of laptop use means a lot of
on/off which means a lot of hot/cold which is really bad for hard
drives.

And for 5.25" hard drives I have an old 1.2 GB Quantum drive that
sounds like a screaming cat going through a jet engine. You can
seriously hear it from outside my house with all the windows and doors
closed. But it actually still works all these years later. :)

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