Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad Mitchell
I have over a thousand drives in service - they all fail unpredictably, sooner or later. In general, we have had a superb service record with Seagate. My advice, if you want a good hard drive buy an enterprise model - WD Raptor on the consumer side or anything SCSI.
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Brad, do you keep any statistics on the failure rate of your drives?
As a "consumer" I think I've only ever had one drive fail prior to this, an IBM Deskstar. It wasn't what you'd expect either - it was not a DeathStar, rather a firmware bug that energised the write/erase heads while they were still seeking. The mechanics are fine and it low level formats, but it's useless because the same bug could wipe out my data again.
When I built this workstation about 18 months ago I planned for redundancy from the start, so there are 7 drives in total associated with it (two RAID arrays and an external standalone). The probability of ANY ONE drive failing is likely to be higher because of the multiple drives, I just didn't expect the actual failure rate to be so high.
Seagate have replied and confirmed that my testing is sufficient to mark the drive as faulty. I'll return it today.