WD3202ABYS vs. WD3200AAKS (MTBF?)

urbanriot

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 30, 2006
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159
Our company mainly specializes in selling systems to business or corporate clients that often require systems with 24/7 uptime, continually processing data or systems of 'high reliability.'

For years we'd built our systems with Western Digital's enterprise or "RE" line of products and in 5 years we haven't had a SINGLE bad hard drive since switching from Seagate (which had a disturbingly high failure rate). Unfortunately, due to stock and pricing with our main distributors this summer, we were forced to temporarily look for alternatives.

We evaluated Seagate's 320GB NS line; however, this requirement coincided with the release of Western Digital's single platter 320GB desktop drives, which are phenomenally quieter than any of the Seagates we tested, and run very cool. So far, we haven't had a failure with either an enterprise Seagate drive, or a desktop single platter WD drive.

Now our distributer once again has stock of the enterprise WD RE3 320GB drives (which are now also single platter), albeit $20 more than the single platters. I attempted to pull up the MTBF of the RE3 320's vs. the 320AAKS's, however that information isn't available on WD's site for the latter drives. Typically, the RE drives have higher MTBF, operate at a lower temperature, have a greater shock tolerance and a few other differences from their desktop line.

So, all of that being said, I'm curious if anyone else here with a wide range of first hand experience has seen recent failure rate trends and has any insight into whether it would be worth the $20 to make the switch back to the enterprise WD drives (which have never failed me) or stick with the cheaper desktop drives (which haven't failed us yet).
 
For a business I would not run critical servers on desktop drives.. Even if they are the same thing, if worst comes to worst I want to show I did my due diligence and didn't cheap out on $20 that ended up costing the company a lot more than that.
 
Whoops, I probably should have mentioned, I was talking about workstations and not servers.
 
My answer: it depends.
If your workstations are highly-paid engineers where downtime equates to significant dollars then perhaps you consider the enterprise drives. If it's joe punchclock, with hundreds or thousands of workstations where downtime doesn't mean that much or you can swap em out for a new desktop pretty quick - it shouldn't matter and you should optimize on price / desktop.
 
ah, for workstations, whatever.. I never let my users save data on their desktops anyway.. So their local drive is just to boot off of / install apps to.
 
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