My experience as a professional in the industry tracks with what has been said here. The "bathtub curve" applies to HDD, video cards, and monitors, although my luck with HDD has been pretty good.
There have always been different grades of drives, but in the past it had more to do with the type of drive and not the brand. So SCSI drives used to be more durable and expensive. BUT, now we have grades of drives within brands of SATA drives. Unfortunately, now retired, I do not know what signals a more reliable drive other than, perhaps, warranty and price. So I stick to the brands that have never let me down: Hitachi (which bought IBM laptop and desktop drives) and Fujitsu. Often, Fujitsu does not seek high performance which may explain their reliability. I would *guess* that the 15,000rpm drives are reliable and others with extreme performance. You mention that you are a smoker and I think that's a negative environmental factor for your HDDs over time. I would seek to incorporate additional filtering into my racks to supplement the itty-bitty filters on the HDD air intakes and exhausts. When one of our managers passed-away from a cause unrelated to his chain smoking, we had to remove ash from the interior of his desktop computer which had stood on the floor - it was like an ashtray. Ron Rogers _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://www.liveaboardnow.org/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardnow.org/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
