RE: Re: Which SATA Drives?

["Phil Harris" <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

It could be cynically suggested that the increase in price could
simply be a
way of offsetting the cost of the (slightly) higher failure / returns rate
on drives used within the enterprise environment?

Realistically I would assume that the mechanisms are unchanged between
currently available enterprise and non-enterprise versions of the same
drives however there can be firmware changes to optimize things like seek
noise (usually acceptable to be louder for enterprise drives), thermal
calibration, seek performance under vibration caused by multi-drive
installs
etc.

For domestic use - even if spinning 24/7 - non-enterprise drives are
unlikely to be of any real disadvantage and from the few NAS drives I've
seen with their guts hanging out they seem not to use enterprise drives
either.

Phil

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf
> Of domdevitto
> Sent: 23 September 2007 10:06
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: [ukha_d] Re: Which SATA Drives?
>
> Hmmm, the difference between 'enterprise' and normal maybe only the
> price.
>
> Before you part with your cash I suggest you dig out the Google
> research on hard drive faults in their platform.
> Little snippets include:
> - 50% of the time, drives fail instantly, with no SMART indicator or
> any kind.
> - Activity doesn't have any direct correlation to failure rate.
>
> etc.
>
> Obviously they were using older commodity drives in their platform,
> but they don't use one vendor, or (seemingly) type of drive.
>
> IIRC, I think a particular note was made about enterprise drives not
> being noticeably more reliable...
>
> Dom
> --- In ukha_d@xxxxxxx, Ben McCormack <yahoogroup@...> wrote:
> >
> > All
> >
> > Following on from Phil's example I now have my mac mini all setup
as
> > a server but I need some additional external drives for storage.
> >
> > I have decided on one of the 4 drive Sata to Firewire cases from
> Span.
> >
> > Initially I only need 2 Drives (will be RAID 1), I am looking at
> > around 320Gb drives and they will be running 24*7.
> >
> > So does anyone have recommendations on good drives to buy?
> >
> > I can see the Seagate Barracuda ES drives are passed for 24*7
> > operations and have a 5 year warranty.
> >
> > Any thoughts and advice much appreciated
> >
> > Regards
> > Ben
> >
>
>
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