So what type of hard drive to get for reliable storage in 2012?

[Kirika]

So what type of hard drive to get for reliable storage in 2012?

I had one of my western digital 2 tb greens in my raid 1data storage array die. Wasn't even that old picked it up last year when they were on sale for $59 before the price hike. Will RMA it for replacement but considering getting new drives after reading that the green drives aren't so reliable.

This storage raid is also backed up to a 2tb western digital elements drive.

I been buying western digital drives for a long time and having no problems till well after the 5 year warranty period was up but now I'm hearing the blacks and greens aren't so reliable and they made cuts in warranty periods for 2012. First hand I had a green in my data raid and a black at work die which I haven't seen any deaths till well after warranty period in the past.

I haven't had much luck with Sea gate I picked up some enterprise drives for my video array and every single one of them died and had to be rmaed.

The samsung spinpoint in the tv box had to be rmaed once also.

What do you suggest getting for reliable storage drives going forward?

Probably will stick with my current set up till the prices drop.

 

[drescherjm]

I had one of my western digital 2 tb greens in my raid 1data storage array die. Wasn't even that old picked it up last year when they were on sale for $59 before the price hike. Will RMA it for replacement but considering getting new drives after reading that the green drives aren't so reliable.

Any drive from any manufacturer can and will die at any time from the time of manufacture to its 5 year expected lifetime (and beyond if you are lucky) even if it was lightly used. If you want less failures you can get enterprise drives but these cost 2 to 4 times as much and they still fail.

A google study of drives in 2007 showed an expected annual failure rate of about 2% to 8% for the for the first 5 years of usage. See figure 2:
http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

What do you suggest getting for reliable storage drives going forward?

Don't try to fight it. Expect failure from any drive and make sure you have backups. Also watch your drive SMART with a program like CrystalDiskInfo so you have a chance of predicting failure before the drive is dead.


BTW, If I sound very cynical. I RMA 10 to 20 drives a year at work every year (for the last 3 to 5 years) out of 200 or so in use 24/7/365. Failure rates were lower before that but I still did a few RMAs per year.

 

[Aesma]

Well, there is only WD and Seagate left, so it's not like you have a large choice, and WD will have a better warranty than Seagate. Seagate is also getting out of green drives (which in my opinion don't fail more than other drives).

 

[drescherjm]

Good point. WDC bought Hitachi and Seagate bought Samsung so there are only 2 companys left that make hard drives for desktops. I believe Toshiba still exists but they make laptop drives and a few enterprise SAS drives.