A statistical analysis was published on a variety of disk drive lines a few years ago with a sample size of well over 100,000 drives[1].
Other studies have shown negligible actual reliability differences between server and consumer lines across large populations.
Quality on consumer drives tends to be more variable, but no lower overall.
I've seen all of the major brands work and fail at similar rates across large numbers of drives. Sometimes a batch will be bad, and age-in-store has a huge impact on reliability.
Overall, run load as heavy as your main application will do for the first 3 months, as many drive failures seem to happen then (and it'll be in warranty).
After that, the next spike in failure happens at around 2 years and failure rates remain high thereafter.
MTBF numbers seem to be largely irrelevant.
Interestingly, SMART data seem to also be largely useless as well.
[1]
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
Brian Cluff wrote:
> I'll third on western digital, seagates are also pretty good, but
> whatever you do don't even start to consider Maxtor. They seem to have
> a near 100% failure rate. It's not if they are going to fail, but when.
>
> Also don't go with any hard drive manufacturers budget line or low end
> drive, try and go for drives that are made for server. They aren't all
> that much more, but seem to have much lower failure rates.
>
> Brian Cluff
>
> On 05/19/2010 03:14 PM, Shawn Badger wrote:
>> +2 on Bonnie++
>>
>> I also tend to like the Western digital line for IDE/SATA drives. I have
>> had a few bad ones (out of hundreds), but they tend to run well for me.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Alex Dean <alex@crackpot.org
>> <mailto:alex@crackpot.org>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On May 19, 2010, at 5:07 PM, Nadim Hoque wrote:
>>
>> Hey,
>>
>> I am buying a new hard drive for my computer and I was wondering
>> what are some good hard drive stress test and how long should I
>> let it run for. I also do not mind what platform (windows, mac,
>> or linux) it will run on. Speaking of hard drives, which brand
>> do u guys recommend?
>>
>>
>> Bonnie++ is a disk benchmarking tool, but you can use it for stress
>> testing as well. Pretty easy to compile on Linux. I'm not sure if
>> it works on OSX or windows.
>>
>> alex
>>
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