How are they going to be cheaper than $50 per disk?
On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 9:46 AM, Ken Cornetet <ken.corne...@kimball.com>wrote: > Have you considered solid state drives? > > -----Original Message----- > From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto: > listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of listserve > Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2013 9:28 AM > To: 'ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com' > Subject: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard > drives? > > I'm paying much less than that per drive. > > I really won't have to do much except swap out the drives once this is set > up. > > I work for a small private school and make MUCH less than $100K. This will > be a summertime project when kids and teachers are gone and I will have > some spare time. I do agree that at my previous office job we would have > never considered this and would have just purchased the most expensive > drives available. (Of course we had 20% of those fail too...) > > I REALLY don't want to have to pull these workstations once they are > mounted, so I'm willing to do this to try to better guarantee the > reliability of the new drives. > > -----Original Message----- > From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto: > listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of Ken Schaefer > Sent: Monday, May 20, 2013 8:55 PM > To: ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com > Subject: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard > drives? > > I'm still with Brian on this. > > Newegg seems to sell 1TB 7200 RPM drives for ~$70. How much are you saving > per drive? $20? (i.e. paying $50) > > $50 x 100 = $5000. Say three times as many of these fail versus retail (6% > vs 2%) then you're talking about 4% of $5000 or $200. How much is your time > worth, given you're going to spend xyz hours setting this test up and > running it? > > If my engineer was costing me $100K/year, I wouldn't want them spending > time on something like this - surely there'd be more valuable things they > could be doing. > > Cheers > Ken > > -----Original Message----- > From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto: > listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of listserve > Sent: Tuesday, 21 May 2013 7:09 AM > To: 'ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com' > Subject: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard > drives? > > I have a couple of reasons for doing this: > > 1. These are "bulk" drives, not retail, so I don't trust them as much. I > really want to return as many as possible right off the bat, any that might > have failed in the first month or two. The price difference between these > and retail (or even Newegg) makes this well worth my while, especially > since we are purchasing 100. > > 2. 30 of these are going into our computer lab, where we are very tight > for space. We had special flush mounts made so that our Optiplex 745's hang > off the back of our tables (not folding tables), saving a lot of desk > space. Because of this(and for other reasons), the tables need to screwed > to the floor, and some have their backs to the wall, which means everything > must be pulled out to get the PC out of the mount. This setup has worked > extremely well for us for 1.5 years, and I haven't had to pull out a single > PC yet. > > 3. I'd like to use this same setup in the future to test my server drives > before I put them into production. > > 4. Something else I'm thinking about that I'll elaborate on later... > > Our current drives are 5-6 year old 80GB and benchmarked at about 50MBps > read/write. My new 1TB 7200rpm test drives benched over 100MBps. The > difference is noticeable with our aging hardware. We will also be adding > RAM, upgrading to Win7, etc. I did the math and we are spending 1/3 to 1/4 > the cost of buying new PCs. I will buy a few spare 745's or 755's(they are > dirt cheap) in case any die. > > -----Original Message----- > From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto: > listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of Brian Desmond > Sent: Monday, May 20, 2013 2:54 PM > To: ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com > Subject: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard > drives? > > Is the cost to do this exercise lower than just replacing saying six > failed hard drives (given a 5 to 7 percent failure rate) over the next > three years? > > I've never heard of anyone do this - it seems like an awful lot of work > for a return I'm having trouble quantifying. > > Thanks, > Brian Desmond > br...@briandesmond.com > > w – 312.625.1438 | c – 312.731.3132 > > -----Original Message----- > From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto: > listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of listserve > Sent: Monday, May 20, 2013 11:55 AM > To: 'ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com' > Subject: [NTSysADM] What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? > > I'm going to be ordering about 100 hard drives in the next month or so to > upgrade our desktops over the summer. I'd like to be able to put 10(or > more) of these at a time in 2 enclosures(5-bays each) I have and run > thorough surface scans on them before installing them. (30 of them are > going into workstations that are mounted in a computer lab where the drives > will be more difficult to remove later) > > I've used Spinrite for years, and actually got it running in several VMs > under hyper-v, using pass-through disks. This works well because I can scan > multiple drives at once, which really is necessary since one scan alone can > take 50 hours. Spinrite just doesn't get the SMART data while in a VM, but > I can do that in the host with a different app. I'm also a little concerned > that write-caching in the host could interfere with the accuracy of the > surface scan, but have no way to know since this is an unsupported > configuration for that app. > > Do you guys know of any other apps out there similar to Spinrite, that I > can hopefully run in the host instead of inside a VM? My main requirement > is that I be able to scan multiple disks at once. > > Any other thoughts on this? Better way to approach it altogether? > > Thanks, > > Mike > >
