I ride herd on maybe three or four thousand Hitachi Ultrastar A7K{2,3,4}000 2 TB and 3 TB disks and they take a real pounding with the workload here and they have just been fantastic ... great drives; very solid ... Also used the WDC RE4 when Thailand got flooded out a few years ago and we were in a pinch ... they've been pretty good as well ... not quite as good as the Hitachis, but not awful (a moot point now that Hitachi owns WDC, I suppose).
I don't trust Seagate quite to the same level however I think they're fine for lighter-duty server or certainly home environments ... it's hard to find a truly bad drive these days (although they are certainly out there ... the WDC 2 TB "Green" unit will always stand out in my mind). Best, Sean On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 4:54 PM, Ali <cct...@fahimi.net> wrote: > > In the case of spinning rust, what brand is most reliable? I've seen > > dreadful reports of DOA drives from Western Digital, fewer from > > Seagate, > > but I don't know about Hitachi, Samsung, etc. > > Caveat: my experience is as a home "power user" > > In my experience it all depends: I have a set of Seagate "consumer grade" > SATA drives that are now nearly 10 years old that have been spinning in a > RAID 6 almost 24x7 w/o issues. These were bought when Seagate offered a > FIVE > year warranty. I've also bought a number of the same type of drives in the > past five years but with only a three year warranty and the failure rate on > those have been abysmal! > > Now days I buy "enterprise class drives" (have a RAID 6 w/ 4TB Hitachi > drives and RAID 5 setups w/ Seagate ES and Cheetah drives). They cost a > pretty penny but the peace of mind is worth it. The also have better > warranty service. > > I've never bothered w/ WD drives so I can't comment on those. > > If I could find a cheap tape backup solution I would love it but anything > capable of reasonably backing up 20TB is well out of the consumer pocket > book. > > -Ali > >