HD Reliability Thread

I'd like to gather everyone's experiences with the various HD that have been used here.

The goal is to build a good bit of data for future users of this product to use to build their systems with.


I'll start with the Seagate Barracudu ES2 Drives. I'll never recommend them again. Plagued with issues - drives aborting commands - dropping offline, high failure rate. I've used firmware SN04, 05, AN05 and I continue to have issues in the 500GB and 1TB capacities.
I have over 32 Seagate ES2 drives and will currently be replacing them with Western Digital RE3 drives.

I've used the WD RE2 drives in 400GB capacities and can recommend these. When we deploy onto the RE3 drives, I'll report back here.

Can anyone comment on using either Raptors/Velociraptors in SAN environments?

We really haven't had any problem with Seagate's drives. We updated the firmware to SN06 (which supposed to--and so far does--work great) as a precautionary step, but we haven't had significant issues with them.

One thing you have to remember is that all HD manufacturers will have a bad batch of drives/firmware every so often. It has happened to Western Digital, too.

On a seperate note, Western Digital has just announced their 2TB SATA drives. YAY! Now, it's easy to fit 1PB in a single rack.

We use only Seagate drives (SCSI/SAS/ES) here, and have had a pretty decent run with them, certainly no worse than others using different brands. The latest Seagte FW issue is a bit stressful (tho we have been lucky with timing), but other brands have had their problems in the past as well, when we have been most happy that we weren't using brand X.

In general & across all sorts of servers we supply, we have always have better reliablity with SAS drives than SATAs, regardless of what the quoted MTBFs say. The number of Seagate SAS drives we RMA these days is very small. Cheers.

A question for you, Silicon:

Have you used the 7200 rpm SAS drives (i.e. the 1TB ones)? Are they any better than the SATA ES ones, as far as reliability? How do they stack up against the 15000rpm SAS drives (reliability wise)?

What kind of controller/HBA are you using? How many drives? What RAID lvl?

I second Robotbeat's question. How are the 7200 SAS drives? Are the 500GB capacity more reliable? That's all I really care about. I mean all my VMs will be on these drives - but I don't want to pay 300 bucks a drive!