hard disk drive durability ratings

[Ellis Vener]

Interesting stuff on hard disk drive reliability factors: the WD Red  series comes out really well as does Hitatchi: http://techreport.com/news/25940/hard-drive-reliability-study-names-names

[Steve Weldon]

I liken WD Reds to diesel engines in cars.  Designed to be efficient, run within a small RPM range, and while not overly powerful they're built for the long haul.

Hitachi's..  If you don't get one of their known batches of defects, you'll get a drive that will last forever.  I have 6-7 2tb drives that were the first 2tb drives to come out.. so 5-6 years old?  And they're still scoring strong on their SMART tests.  4 of them were in a rather hot running RAID/NAS enclosure that I first put them in and are now at my sons house working great.  I told him to keep air flow going and what did he do?  He closed the door on them in a cabinet.  You can't touch them for longer than 5-6 seconds before it's too warm to be comfortable.

[Larry Heath]

Funny you should mention this. I just replaced one of those 1.5 TB Seagate drives in the article you linked to, it was the system drive in my server, and it recently started handing out warnings of impending doom. It went into service around the end of 2009, so I guess I got my money’s worth out of it. At a guess that server had not been down for more than a few hours in all that time, well until it declared itself on deaths door.

I had been contemplating preemptively replacing it for a while now and this forced my hand. I went with a WD 2TB Black WD2003FZEX, dropped the old and new drives in the cloner, Bing, Bang, Boom, easy peasy. Plugged it back in the server and all is well in the world. Well actually a good bit better, truth be told, the server is substantially more responsive now. I kind of wish I’d changed out that drive a while ago.  It is a bit noisy and runs a bit warmer, but if that is all I have to deal with I am pleased as punch.

I guess this one is about 1.2M hrs. MTBF  (~135 yrs.) as opposed to 2M MTBF for the Hitachi drives, which is still way better than the 750K for the Seagate stuff, per Seagate, and less  than that by a substantial margin according to others out in the real world, some saying  as low as 25k or just sort of 3 years. The WD2003FZEX drives have most of the good stuff in the WD enterprise drives at about half the price.  So far it seems a good choice, fingers crossed. Maybe as I need to replace the hot swappable storage drives in the server, one of which is the dread 1.5 TB Seagate unit, I will try a Hitachi drive.

Later Larry