I think hard drives go in cycles of good/pad drives... and the best thing admins can do is stay informed enough to keep up with the latest garbage. There have been times were I have used Maxtors, WD, Seagate, IBM, and a couple of know-names or brands I cant remember. From 20 years of doing this.. I dont think I have had any brand have a track record of good drives more than 2 years. After that they always seem to become too popular and cant build enough disks to meet demand. The drives then go into free-fall and people swear never to use them again and the next big manufacturer comes out. This is my normal pattern (after being burnt too long). Never rely on one disk drive for critical data. Use at least 3.. it triples the failure rate but decreases the recovery time in a normal failure case. If you are doing this yourself, buy 4 spares for every production drive and burn them all regularly to make sure you dont have a dud in the spare cabinet. Never use the latest set of drive technologies unless you REALLY have to. Always calculate the maximum power consumption of your disk drives and compare it with the maximum constant power your power supply can accomplish. If you have data that doesnt change and you have a machine in a dirty room, use solid state as much as possible. Find out the disk drive manufacturers that the big boys (EMC, Netapp, etc) are using and AVOID them if possible. Netapp, EMC, IBM etc buy disks in LARGE allotments, put them through a torture test and return all the ones that dont survive (95 in 100 usually dont). The disk manufacturer usually rebuilds them.. and rumour some resell them. In any case, the best of the drives are being bought by the really big guys, and smaller dealers only get whats left. -- Stephen J Smoogen. Professional System Administrator - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-admin" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
