On 12/10/10 17:25, Paolo Aglialoro wrote: > ok, what manufacturers are left??? :)) just toshiba??? >
I'm going to say "Anyone who says brand X is great and Y is crap" has just exposed themselves as a newbie in the computer business. :) I've seen every make of drive have some real stinkers, and also build drives that don't seem to die. Unfortunately, by the time you can say, "This model is really good" or "this model is a disaster", it's too late, the drive has been out of production for six months (or has had its production processes changed, and the old results don't represent the current production runs). One of the worst drives in terms of quality and failure I ever saw was the Seagate ST225. One of the best was...uh...the Seagate ST225. The difference was at the beginning, the ST225 was a cutting edge drive, a whopping 20M of storage in a half-height case, with a label on the drive listing dozens of bad sectors. By the end of its production run, the bad sector tables on almost all ST225 drives were COMPLETELY empty, they were 100% good out of the box, and would run long past their useful life. By this point, they were old tech and Just Worked. (ok, the worst drives I ever had were "JTS". One day, I was overly frustrated at all the major drive makers, and saw these "JTS" brand drives, and figured they either had a good idea or a bad one. Turned out to be bad beyond my imagination... Fortunately, they seem to have vanished from the world shortly after they arrived, but... *shudder*) I discovered (quite) a few years back that you could toast a Samsung disk on demand using the Novell disk test utility. Now, I can't seem to get one to fail. Right now, if you buy a 2TB disk, expect it to be unreliable. Expect a 300G drive to last for quite some time (if you can find one). You still have to have backups, you still have to have plan for what you do until it is repaired (failure tolerance), and you have to have a plan for how you will repair it (failure recovery). If you are deploying a thousand machines, yeah, it would be really nice to know that this particular production run will blow 200 drives in the expected life span of the project and that another model and production run would blow 50, and buy the one that will fail only 50, but you won't have that kind of information until the project is done. For small projects, all drives of all types, technologies and interfaces can and do fail. Be ready for it. Have a backup, have a failure tolerance and recovery plan. Here's another thought: for maximum data retention, your drives (and the rest of your systems) *must fail* from time to time, and do so often enough to keep you remembering that they DO fail to keep your backup solutions working and your failure tolerance and recovery plans useful. Go enough years without an "oh poop" incident, you get cocky and sloppy. I can't prove that statement, but if you don't believe me, you might prove it for me. :) Me? I usually buy whatever is cheap and on sale. And if it fails, I test my tolerance and recovery plans :) Do this right, your system will be back up faster than you can digest dozens of people's opinions about the "best" drives and pick one (which may turn out to be a stinker anyway). Nick.
