[NTLUG:Discuss] OT: HD manufacturer's utilities fail to see drive (was New Data Disk Errors)

[Chris Cox]

Richard Geoffrion wrote:
...
> For the record,  out of 18 identical Maxtor MaxLine Plus II SATA 
> enterprise drives, I've had all EIGHTEEN fail within a 2.5 year 
> period...along with two of the warranty replacement drives.  That's OVER 
> a 100% failure rate.   Today...I'm changing out a failed desktop-quality 
> 160Gig PATA drive after 3.5 years of use in a server....(which...I 
> suppose I find respectable.)

This somewhat matches my experience with Maxtor lately (and likewise now
with Seagate since a LARGE percentage of their new drives are now really
Maxtors).  My experience is 100% failure rate within 5-6 years.  I'd
say I'm seeing about a 30-40% failure rate in the 2.5 - 3 year range
(which is still unacceptably high).

BUT... things do change.  So while I think Maxtor is pretty flimsy
today... who knows about tomorrow.  Seagate isn't likely to continue
to product crummy drives.... my guess is that this will get fixed.
But I don't think it's fixed yet.  So a lot of those 7200.9 series
Seagates... will likely die long before the 5 year warranty
runs out... be warned.  Some of the 7200.10's I believe are still
really Seagate produced... they may be of better quality (but
you never know... Seagate can change what factory produces
the drive).

Good drives that have been around here for a long time are:

1. WD 160GB ATA (we've had one failure in a 16 drive RAID in over 5 years)
2. Hitachi TK400 (we've had ZERO failures in a 14 drive RAID in almost 5
years)

With that said, we have lots of the Maxtors.  We have two 14 drive
arrays with the Maxline II 300GB ATA drives (a real loser for Maxtor).
I've replaced about 22 of those over the past ..almost 6 years.
I expect that all will die by time 6 years is reached.

All of these arrays are used a lot, housing home directories, software
repositories and disk-to-disk backups.

Sadly, the 5 year warranties ran out on the Maxline II series...
so we're on our own (and we're moving all of that data as I speak).
At home I have an array of mixed 200GB consumer level Maxtor
drives and 250GB Maxline II's.  So far, the 250GB Maxline II's
seem to be of better quality than the 300GB version.  I haven't lost
one yet.

Our new storage array at work consists of 42 TK500 Hitachi SATA drives.
Given the performance of the TK400's we have, we have high hopes that it
will be equally as reliable.  This unit will replace the existing
Maxtor and Hitachi based units we have.

The downside is that the Hitachi drives only have 3 year warranties.

Failures in SCSI land are across the board, but primarily Seagates
and Fujitsu's.  But that may just be because we have more of those.
OEM's Seagates from HP seem to perform much less reliably than
direct purchased drives from Seagate.... just fyi (drives out
of warranty from HP we are replacing with drives purchased
directly from Seagate).  I think all of our Maxtor SCSI's
have died now... but I don't think HP is getting drives from
them anymore (well... I guess since it's all Seagate now.. that
isn't true anymore).

No data on our SAS drives.  We may have lost 1... but not enough
time on them to make any kind of statement.