Comments on: Enterprise Drives: Fact or Fiction?

By: reed_tarlton

reed_tarlton — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 13:48:40 +0000

In reply to bill_mcgonigle. I would like to see this too. If he's going to point out the limitation of the data, he's got to update when that's no longer a limitation!

By: Justin Paone

Justin Paone — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 20:14:44 +0000

flawed comparison. enterprise drives in server farms are being written to and read from 24/7. where as consumer drives for most people are sitting idle most of the day just spinning. power on hours is not a valid comparison. physically enterprise drives are built better, probably why you get a better warranty. i would also imagine they have better quality control. i have purchased only consumer drives in the past and every decade who’s on top for reliability changes. i currently have several 2tb samsung drives running and half have smart errors, half don’t. its just a gamble i guess. hoping my new hp enterprise drives give me less troubles, but they are seagate so i doubt it.

By: bill_mcgonigle

bill_mcgonigle — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 21:47:23 +0000

Update this with the most recent data?

By: Mohamed Saied

Mohamed Saied — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 08:09:23 +0000

I do agree with @ColoradoMatt:disqus

By: Hexaglow

Hexaglow — Sun, 28 May 2017 02:33:00 +0000

Are there physical properties within each pod that are micro-monitored?
There could be potentially be very valuable data here which would help discover factors effecting drive health. Ideally each individual drive should multiple sensors around it for vibration and heat.

There could be different amount of vibration in different areas of the pod or for individual hard drives. Drives with higher vibration are likely to fail earlier but does a drive with higher vibration effect drives immediate around it? If so, having a reasonably long time record of individual drive vibration would provide detailed statistics of where in the pod drives are failing. This could even enable you to calculate an acceptable amount of vibration and introduce an upper limit, over which you could reject new drives which have vibration levels which may be effecting the life span of other drives. This could save you money in the long term.

A thermal sensor for individual drives may enable you to map out hot spots in your pods airflow and correct it.

Since the pod idea is a new one I’m guessing there are design characteristics to be discovered and improved on so there probably should be individual drive monitoring.

By: Brian Johnson

Brian Johnson — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 17:47:00 +0000

Not only drive hardware, I even run an old server with an updated maintenance (https://www.spectra.com/support-maintenance/) guide which doesnt give my any issues at all.

By: IanMak

IanMak — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 12:19:00 +0000

In reply to Timo Witte.

I think you are right in the case of Western Digital Blacks vs Western Digital RE drives. I owned both.

However Seagate Enterprise/Constellation drives are NOT Barracudas. Oh I remember those Barracudas. I claimed warranty on the 7200.8 like 5 times within 1 year. Sure they warranty it and send you infinite refurbished ones but who wants to deal with 5 drive replacements in 1 year? I just threw it out and bought myself a set of WD RE2. My friends had problems with Barracuda 7200.11 and 7200.12. Barracudas were so bad they discontinued the name. Their enterprise drives have a completely different enclosure and circuit board design.

Im currently running 4x Seagate Enterprise drives in RAID 0 for max performance. Pretty neat drives. They are fast and don’t fail like other Seagate drives.

By: Mudder Fukker

Mudder Fukker — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 00:15:00 +0000

In reply to Julian. In my experience, Refurbs are more reliable than new drives. Of course, my 'data set' is prolly less than 1,000 drives (20 years as tech). My guess is that they have had the one or two things that went wrong replaced, and had a good second testing. I have some refurbs around here going on 8+ years.

By: ZeDestructor

ZeDestructor — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 09:36:00 +0000

In reply to Timo Witte. That's basically what backblaze and the ZFS, distributed FS (Ceph, Lustre) and SAN cabals do for the most part. It's just so much nicer to deal with.