I think they fudge the MTBF! They say 1,000,000 hours MTBF. That's over 114 years! Drives don't last anywhere near that long. Someone I know has 4 IBM disks. 3 of 4 have failed. 1 or 2 were replaced and the replacement drive(s) have failed. All still under warranty! He gave up on IBM since the MTBF seems to be less than 1 year. This was about 2-3 years ago. He mirrors thing most of the time. In the past I have almost never had a disk failure. Almost all on my drives became too small to use before they failed. The drives ranged from 10Meg to 3Gig. Drives larger than 3Gig seem to fail before you out grow them. I would love to see real live stats. Claimed MTBF and actual MTBF. I just checked Seagate and Maxtor. They don't give a MTBF anymore. When did that happen! Just Service life and Warranty. Anyway the best indicator of expected life, the warranty. If the manufacture thinks the drive will only last 1 or 3 years (depending on size or model), who am I to argue? -----Original Message----- From: linux-raid-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:linux-raid-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Lange Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2004 3:58 PM To: LinuxRaid Subject: Hard drive Reliability? I have a few discussions recently with technical service people and we all come to the conclusion that Hard Drives are far less reliable than they used to be. Case in point, I have a 120G Maxtor drive in a server that began to fail less than 8 months into service. Major headache. I've heard similar stories from other people. I guy I know that sells both desktop and file server systems now says he now only builds motherboards with some kind of RAID 1 and dual drives because drives fail so often this saves loads of headaches. After a their system has died and they 'lost everything' people are more than willing to pay the extra $150 for redundancy. I know drive manufactures were sued recently in a class action for shipping drives which they knew were going to fail prematurely but that was a few years back. So what are other peoples feelings about drive reliability and are some brands better than others? Does anyone know of any web sites with statistics or test data? -- John Lange - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
