On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > Alan McKinnon wrote: <SNIP> >> My thoughts these days is that nobody really makes a bad drive anymore. >> Like cars[1], they're all good and do what it says on the box. Same >> with bikes[2]. >> >> A manufacturer may have some bad luck and a product range is less than >> perfect, but even that is quite rare and most stuff ups can be fixed >> with new firmware. So it's all good. > > > That's my thoughts too. It doesn't matter what brand you go with, they > all have some sort of failure at some point. They are not built to last > forever and there is always the random failure, even when a week old. > It's usually the loss of important data and not having a backup that > makes it sooooo bad. I'm not real picky on brand as long as it is a > company I have heard of. >
One thing to keep in mind is statistics. For a single drive by itself it hardly matters anymore what you buy. You cannot predict the failure. However if you buy multiple identical drives at the same time then most likely you will either get all good drives or (possibly) a bunch of drives that suffer from similar defects and all start failing at the same point in their life cycle. For RAID arrays it's measurably best to buy drives that come from different manufacturing lots, better from different factories, and maybe even from different companies. Then, if a drive fails, assuming the failure is really the fault of the drive and not some local issue like power sources or ESD events, etc., it's less likely other drives in the box will fail at the same time. Cheers, Mark
