I'll have to disagree a bit here. Manufacturers go through cycles and usually there is one that stands out on a size/period.
Manufacturers almost never change the manufacturing process over time for a particular drive. They will update firmware as time goes buy. So a good drive today is going to be equally good in a few years. The thing I disagree with is that there are very good 2TB drives out there. The trick is to have enough of a brand (usually a few hundred) to start to understand it's personality. If you have volume you can pretty easily determine which manufacturer is good today and sucked yesterday. And when a new generation drives come out it starts all over again. Oh and be safe, make backups. FWIW On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 11:11:52PM -0500, Nick Holland wrote: > 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.
