Best medium/enterprise level SATA HD?
 

These drives will be used in a 4 drive RAID10 array, but not jam packed and not high usage (it's just a single workstation - RAID is for availability). So the environment might be a little heavier than a typical single drive case, but they won't be working hard.

So far I'm looking at the WD RE2 and Seagate Barracuda ES.

The WD Raptor looked interesting until I saw the maximum capacity was 150GB :( I need 300GB+, preferably 500GB+

Any ideas appreciated!

PS: These are to replace the P.O.S. 300Gb Seagate drives, 4 out of 4 have failed.

As I stated in your previous thread, there is literally no statistical difference between failures of the "enterprise" level drives, and "consumer" level drives. In many cases, they are identical with a slightly different firmware build, and perhaps a bit more cache.

This is from failure statistics of well over 10,000 hard drives currently running our our facility.

For really no other reason than the 5 year warranty across the board, I generally recommend Seagate. All in all though, given a large enough distribution you are really not going to see much difference in failure rates between manufacturers. However, there WILL be certain runs/models of drives that have much higher rates of failures (e.g. IBM 75GXP's, some older maxtor runs, etc.)

Good luck to ya!

Phil,

I think you're right, most of the additional features - such as command queueing or reduced wait time on read errors - are simply software based. I found one review that confirms that one of the Seagate ES models is physically identical to its non enterprise brother.

I thought the RE2 had a different casing with a more aggressive heatsink, but it looks like I got confused with the Raptor.

At this point I'm still undecided about whether to move away from Seagate. I've had no end of issues with these drives, but it's possible it really was just a bad run of luck, and there are not that many other companies to choose from these days.

I'm waiting to see how they respond to my official complaint, which may influence my decision.

Hmmm, one wonders if you could reflash the firmware from an enterprise model onto non enterprise hardware... might save you a few bucks. :1orglaugh

I've been building my own computers since 1992 and in my experience, the main reasons harddrives fail are:
1. Static electricity when installed
2. Poor cooling
3. No grounding

I've had very few harddrives fail since I consider these points with all computers I build. I still got most of the drives I've used since 1994 and they are all working, some got a couple of bad sectors, but that's it.

These days I don't think it matters that much what disks you buy, but if you have really important stuff on the disks I would use different disk brands for each RAID 10 mirror, and if possible different batches for each disk.

The problem with using different brands is that my controller doesn't make it clear which ports are used for each side of the mirror and/or stripe. To further confuse things, Seatools shows a different serial number order than the RAID controller BIOS screen does (and it's a minor difference, like position 2 and 3 swapped).

I wonder if it's better performance wise to match brands for the mirroring or striping portion... I would imagine the former would make more sense, since the seek speed for mirrored writes would be near identical.

Anyway, when I purchased the original 4 drives they came from 3 different countries, but it didn't really make much difference in the end: they've all been replaced due to failure.

It really sounds like an issue on your end. Maybe something in your system is messed up, one of my brothers had a motherboard that fucked up one of his drives.

On the other hand, maybe the delivery company just sucks or you just got really unlucky.

Yeah, even though they were from completely different factories and countries it's possible that at a later stage in the distribution process (or even at the retailer) they were mishandled.

In terms of parts they're all brand name - plenty of cooling, plenty of power supply capacity. I replaced my power supply recently "just in case"

The latest reco drive that was couriered to me from Singapore has stripped thread holes, vibrates and makes a noise like an old high speed CD-ROM drive, and was throwing up S.M.A.R.T. errors within an hour. That was when it was time to put in an official complaint.