I'm going to say "Anyone who says brand X is great and Y is crap" has
just exposed themselves as a newbie in the computer business. :)
I've seen every make of drive have some real stinkers, and also build
drives that don't seem to die. Unfortunately, by the time you can say,
"This model is really good" or "this model is a disaster", it's too
late, the drive has been out of production for six months (or has had
its production processes changed, and the old results don't represent
the current production runs).
One of the worst drives in terms of quality and failure I ever saw was
the Seagate ST225. One of the best was...uh...the Seagate ST225. The
difference was at the beginning, the ST225 was a cutting edge drive, a
whopping 20M of storage in a half-height case, with a label on the drive
listing dozens of bad sectors. By the end of its production run, the
bad sector tables on almost all ST225 drives were COMPLETELY empty, they
were 100% good out of the box, and would run long past their useful
life. By this point, they were old tech and Just Worked.
(ok, the worst drives I ever had were "JTS". One day, I was overly
frustrated at all the major drive makers, and saw these "JTS" brand
drives, and figured they either had a good idea or a bad one. Turned
out to be bad beyond my imagination... Fortunately, they seem to have
vanished from the world shortly after they arrived, but... *shudder*)
I discovered (quite) a few years back that you could toast a Samsung
disk on demand using the Novell disk test utility. Now, I can't seem to
get one to fail.
Right now, if you buy a 2TB disk, expect it to be unreliable. Expect a
300G drive to last for quite some time (if you can find one). You still
have to have backups, you still have to have plan for what you do until
it is repaired (failure tolerance), and you have to have a plan for how
you will repair it (failure recovery).
If you are deploying a thousand machines, yeah, it would be really nice
to know that this ...
