Enterprise Drives vs Consumer

A

awesomo

Gawd
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Mar 20, 2010
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Here is my experience. On multiple occasions, I have blown double the price of a consumer drive, on enterprise drives from WD and Seagate. On multiple occasions, I have received DOA drives or had them die in the field. I have also used consumer drives for some builds and have had similar failure and DOA rates. The consumer drives I purchase instead of the enterprise drives have identical performance and "real world" reliability.

Do you guys buy enterprise drives for your servers? If so, why?
 
I'd be curious to know that as well. Some of the Supermicro enclosures recommend enterprise drives, is there an actual reason for this?
 
Red Squirrel said:
I'd be curious to know that as well. Some of the Supermicro enclosures recommend enterprise drives, is there an actual reason for this?
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Enterprise drives are design for data center environments of rack of server vibrating and higher tolerance for heat. Also designed to be ran 24x7.

just a guess...
 
See I would think that they would have a lower tolerance for heat if anything seeing as most datacenters are kept at 68-75F at all times. Unless you are google/facebook/etc.
 
awesomo said:
Do you guys buy enterprise drives for your servers? If so, why?
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I even get enterprise drives for workstations of important clients....I'll at the minimum get higher end good 3 year models. But for workstations of clients that I need highest reliability for, I'll slap enterprise drives in there.

A long time track record of proving much higher reliability has shown me this is the best approach. The 5 year/ over 1 million hour MTBF drives have a proven track record to stand behind and justify their cost.
 
longer warranty onthem as well.

I have some SATA 1 WesternDigital RE drives that are about 6 years old and have run 24/7 without any issues.
 
I could never justify spending $1000 on the amount of space I can get for $100. What part of the technology is different? They come with the crazy mounting for hot-swap bays and that seems to be the only physical difference. Then there's the warranty. My $90 Hitachi drives have a 2-year warranty, where this $1000 HP drive has a 3-year warranty. That's not justified either. I would expect at least a 10-year warranty.
 
ramicio said:
I could never justify spending $1000 on the amount of space I can get for $100. What part of the technology is different? They come with the crazy mounting for hot-swap bays and that seems to be the only physical difference. Then there's the warranty. My $90 Hitachi drives have a 2-year warranty, where this $1000 HP drive has a 3-year warranty. That's not justified either. I would expect at least a 10-year warranty.
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Huge differences on the inside, much more than just "crazy mounting for hot-swap bays". You can get enterprise drives without hard drive bays BTW. I like getting enterprise drives for my desktops....I often use WD Raptor drives. Which is classified as an enterprise drive, 5 year warranty, 1.2 MTBF (probably higher).

Peace of mind, knowing you have the proper equipment in there doing server duties, how much is your business worth? Do you want your nearly priceless information on true server grade stuff? Or eMachine grade 90 dollar junk?
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
....I often use WD Raptor drives. Which is classified as an enterprise drive, 5 year warranty, 1.2 MTBF (probably higher).
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You know what is funny, I have had more Raptors fail than I do WD Blue drives. In fact, i have a worse fail rate on WD Enterprise drives than I do other drives. Strange but that is my experience

I do use enterprise drives in servers through, no question on that
 
I wasn't aware e-Machines manufactured hard drives :rolleyes: The Raptor is still not an enterprise drive. It is a consumer drive spun to slightly higher speeds. Again, what are the internal difference in these so-called enterprise drives? I have a feeling any difference is going to be a complete Turbo Encabulator pseudo techno-babble rant...much like companies like Monster Cable spew. Information is usually backed up on devices that are NOT run 24.7, by the way.
 
ramicio said:
I wasn't aware e-Machines manufactured hard drives :rolleyes: The Raptor is still not an enterprise drive.
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He ment emachines GRADE, not brand. Meaning a piece of crap HDD

Raptors have a huge sticker that says "Enterprise Storage" on them, you do know this right?
 
k1pp3r said:
You know what is funny, I have had more Raptors fail than I do WD Blue drives. In fact, i have a worse fail rate on WD Enterprise drives than I do other drives. Strange but that is my experience
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I think I've had one in..eh...gonna say 25, fail. But that was a heavy lightening strike that took out lots more.

Love their Black Editions, and RE3 drives.
 
I wasn't aware Maxtor was still around...

Just because something says "enterprise" on its sticker does not mean there is some global consortium who decides what is required to meet the "enterprise" standard. These arguments are still highly subjective.
 
ramicio said:
I wasn't aware e-Machines manufactured hard drives :rolleyes: The Raptor is still not an enterprise drive. It is a consumer drive spun to slightly higher speeds. Again, what are the internal difference in these so-called enterprise drives? I have a feeling any difference is going to be a complete Turbo Encabulator pseudo techno-babble rant...much like companies like Monster Cable spew. Information is usually backed up on devices that are NOT run 24.7, by the way.
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LOL yeah OK Raptors aren't enterprise. Haven't worked with hard drives much eh? Know where they originally came from? Ever hear of MTBF? Better yet..know what MTBF is? Quality of the armature, bearings, liquid cooled bearings, material that the platter is made of

You're clearly formed in your views....your tin foil hat is firmly worn, time is precious for me this morning...I'll move on.
 
As I predicted...all techno-babble and subjective arguments...

Better bearings? What armature? I thought spindle motors were brushless...

If you want to talk about something objective, like Dell overnights drives on warranty for free, longer warranties, just general support...that is worth some people's money. The drives still use the same technology inside. There is so much in the enterprise world that is clearly price-gouged. Hard drives is one of them. Server chassis are another. They have high prices because they've learned that anything is priceless to the latest wasteful business model anymore. If it costs more, it must be necessary :rolleyes:
 
ramicio said:
As I predicted...all techno-babble and subjective arguments...

Better bearings? What armature? I thought spindle motors were brushless...

If you want to talk about something objective, like Dell overnights drives on warranty for free, longer warranties, just general support...that is worth some people's money. The drives still use the same technology inside. There is so much in the enterprise world that is clearly price-gouged. Hard drives is one of them. Server chassis are another. They have high prices because they've learned that anything is priceless to the latest wasteful business model anymore. If it costs more, it must be necessary :rolleyes:
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Yes, because that Fisher Price modem you have is the same as the Motorola one I use, you know, same technology inside and all. :rolleyes:
 
It's amazing how people are still grasping using subjective and insulting comments...

I guess these turntables that cost tens of thousands of dollars make a format that's inferior to CD into something superior to CD just because of how much it costs. That's called polishing a turd (I guess people are going to be smart-asses and send me a link to the MythBusters episode where they polish a dried turd.) It's truly amazing to watch something be outrageously priced, see people buy it, and then defend the purchase to no end.
 
No, actually it's all about money and guesstimates. Without being privvy to the actual manufacturing processes, we can't say for sure what the true specific differences between the Enterprise and Consumer class drives are. We all only know the what the marketing genises throw out as fluff...

That being said, it ends up being a balance game between costs of warranty services (replacement hard drives and labor to fulfill their warranty requirements) and the warranty period they assigned to each series of drives and the features that make their products desirable. Logic would dictate that to keep their warranty costs down for a "higher-end" series the manufacturing would be tighter tolerances, better parts, etc. Unless anyone has a direct pipeline into the hierarchy of one of the manufacturers, EITHER SIDE OF THE DISCUSSION IS PURELY SUBJECTIVE

Side note, have you ever listened to a high-end (Linn Audio,etc) turbtable and an almost unused pressing of a record? I'm guessing not, otherwise you'd have used a different analogy.
 
It would cost less to make sure every drive meets specs in-house, and trash those that don't (enterprise), than to just check every so many drives and deal with the warranties (consumer.)

You aren't going to get vinyl to outperform CD in anything except frequency response, which is most likely just noise. My analogy is perfect. Polishing a turd. It can be made to look shiny, but it's still a piece of feces.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
You're clearly formed in your views....your tin foil hat is firmly worn, time is precious for me this morning...I'll move on.
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Thanks, I needed that after the morning I've had. :D


Generally I won't sell a server with anything other than Enterprise SAS drives or SATA SSDs. I've got hundreds of HP's 2.5" SAS disks in the field and I've had maybe one or two go bad on me in the last five years. I have one client that had two storage servers with 16x 500GB WD SATA drives each, in the last year I've replaced 7 of those hard drives. Mind you, I didn't sell them that turd, but now I have to support it.
 
ramicio said:
You aren't going to get vinyl to outperform CD in anything except frequency response, which is most likely just noise. My analogy is perfect. Polishing a turd. It can be made to look shiny, but it's still a piece of feces.
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And yet you use the "It's amazing how people are still grasping using subjective" argument on everyone else. Just agree to disagree...
 
A person with his own thoughts is always labeled a conspiracy theorist or extremist. Grow up.

There is nothing subjective about vinyl versus CD. Surface noise is physics. Wear and tear is physics. But when you spend thousands of dollars on equipment, physics doesn't matter to the brain anymore, only justifying your purchase.
 
what about nearline?

I use them if I need the space with the warranty. They are still expensive but nothing like the cost of true SAS drives.
 
Jay_oasis said:
what about nearline?

I use them if I need the space with the warranty. They are still expensive but nothing like the cost of true SAS drives.
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I usually stay away from those unless I really need the space. Most of the time we're doing SAN/NAS storage anymore and I only buy HDDs for single server environments or places where there is no SAN/NAS.
 
Another reason for the Enterprise drives is hardware RAID. If you use consumer drives you'll likely end up with the drives dropping out of RAID and being annoying in general.

I've got pretty much all RE3/RE4's deployed in our servers that are using SATA, SAS in everything else. Desktops not so much, most of our data is centralized anyway.

Granted I am somewhat fond of te Samsung Spinpoint F3R's for personal stuff. :)
 
One of the primary reasons for consumer drives dropping from hardware RAIDs is firmware that is intentionally crippled in order to justify charging more for enterprise class drives.
 
Kind of like certain hardware being the same, but they upgrade to a higher model by purchasing some firmware that unlocks features. This is such a filthy way to do business. ECMTuning does it. They no longer have a side-by-side comparison of the v3 lite versus the full v3 packages because the only difference was some tunability to higher RPM. One can purchase an upgrade, firmware.
 
Funny how you claim all the internals are the same, and yet you,like the other side, can not prove your point %100, but apparently everyone else is wrong :rolleyes: to justify your purchase perhaps...

For all we know they could use better motors, better materials et cetera, or perhaps they dont...

On that note i have some hitachi 500G and 1T drives in servers here at work with not a single one failing yet.... not enterprise grade but working great.

Information is usually backed up on devices that are NOT run 24.7, by the way.
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Says who? That has nothing to do with drives but the person administering the systems... by the way.
 
I'm not claiming I'm positive they're the same, I am just waiting for some proof that they are different. No one has done anything to prove it, just asked subjective questions and raised that maybe stuff inside is different, with the usual techno-babble. I think it's all in the quality control and the service you get, not in the technology itself. That, and the fact that anything meant for business is always price gouged.

To put ones eggs in one basket is just asking for trouble.
 
Enterprise drives undergo additional testing. They also have their firmware modified to be more RAID compatible when and where necessary.

We went from the 7200.10 series drive to the WD RE4 drives. So far the 7200.10s had a failure rate of 17% over 4 years. The WD RE3 and RE4 are tracking closer to a 4% annual failure rate.
 
Just my own observations. People still have drives from 20 years ago that still work. Drives today haven't lasted long enough to prove they can last that long. I've had more problems with newer drives in the past 2 years than my 15-20 years of computing. Packing bits closer and closer doesn't come without consequence.
 
i would say that applies for almost anything, just bought a washer and drier a few months back and it comes with a hole 1 year warranty! but then think back to your grandparents one that they had for 50 years...

Things simply are not made as well in a sense these days as they were, and i agree, the closer data gets on hard drives the more chance for corruption, your pushing data closer and closer, tighter and tighter together then back in the 20G / 40G drive days which allows for more chance of data not aligning and so on, i do recall reading about this when they did the new drives with the data being aligned up and down for more room....
 
Wow, 1 year for an appliance. And you probably can't even buy parts to fix it either. I don't like buying things that are just meant to be thrown away and not maintained. This is why for some stuff I prefer to buy industrial, because they cost more at first, but the replacement parts are cheaper than replacing the whole thing over and over. People are more concerned with their appliance's looks than how they function. Ugly old appliances are still kicking. It doesn't matter if they're heavy, they never need to be moved.
 
Part of my standard is I refuse to use 4 platter drives. I have found them "generally" to be less reliable.

3 and 2 platter drives run cooler to that may also be part of the reason they seem to last longer. We use 500GB WD RE4 drives in our products currently. They run very cool and have great performance. The WD black drives are almost the same drive, the difference being firmware and testing.
 
ShadowStriker said:
Yes, because that Fisher Price modem you have is the same as the Motorola one I use, you know, same technology inside and all. :rolleyes:
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No no..he got the 39 dollar USR "Winmodem" on his Celeron 300..and cursed how he disconnected all the time, and it got sooooo slow during heavy downloads. Never read the fine print about winmodems being very "software driven". Meanwhile oblivious to those that spent 100 dollars on a good external hardware controller based 3COM 5610 or better yet...a Courier modem...holding that connection just fine during a thunderstorm and never slowing down even a heartbeat.
 
Actually in the days that I could even stand dialup I always used hardware modems. I was a child, too. I never did go with an external thing, though. I'm not fond of any peripherals that aren't a mouse or keyboard.
 
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