[TriLUG] Hard drive recovery

[James Brigman]

Guys, I'm serious: HOW are you getting so many drives to fail? 

NetApp stuffs data center racks with upwards of 84 Maxtor 350GB drives,
with failure rates of about 1-2 per operating year (about 2.5%). 

Yeah, the bigger 7800rpm and up Maxtor drives run a little warm, but
with just a tiny bit of ventilation, they cool right down. Everyone I
know who runs more than one bit HDD uses HDD coolers with 'em. It
doesn't take much air, strategically placed, and the drives are nice 'n
cool. 

I have four Maxtor drives in unventilated, uncooled USB 2.0 enclosures
and they are working like a champ: 1 80GB, 1 200Gb and two 250GB. They
get warm, but I perch the unit on something to get air flowing around
them and they do fine. 

Look: Maxtor has never put cash in my pocket, so I really don't care
about feverishly defending their product quality. And Seagate is a fine
product line, but I DO care about finding out how you guys saw such
incredible failure rates - I'd like to avoid doing whatever it was that
caused them to fail so dramatically. 

JKB

On Sat, 2005-08-27 at 20:21 -0400, Ed Hill wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-08-27 at 18:04 -0400, Richard Ryder wrote:
> > I've had very similar experiences with the Maxtor 250GB SATA drives.  We ended
> > up replacing about 32 of them with Seagates I think just to get the a little
> > more peace of mind.  Their failure rate was very, very high.
> 
> Yes, and I know of another group that experienced this problem.  Maxtor
> apparently made a few models of 250GB ATA/SATA drives that ran very hot.
> If you used the drives continuously, many died within (or shortly after)
> their 1yr warranty period.
> 
> Ed
>