[Laptopia]

I need to populate a NAS device with four big SATA drives (storage algorithm will be a proprietary one called "X-Raid", similar to RAID-5).

Googling has yielded a number of choices, but I haven't been able to locate a chart of side-by-side comparisons.

Decision criterium is almost solely price/reliability ratio. Speed is not important. If anyone has advice or opinions to offer, please bring it on.

 

[penger]

I think the Tom's Hardware website has a bunch of HDD charts... not sure if they got one for 1TB drives though. Try checking that out.

 

[leftnose]

If you're worried solely about price, go to newegg.com, search/filter for 1TB drives and sort by price. Done.

 

[tot]

Reliability is hard to measure, seems to be a bit of crapshoot and you'll can only look statistics long after the drives are obsolete.

 

[Laptopia]

Quote:

Originally Posted by tot /img/forum/go_quote.gif Reliability is hard to measure, seems to be a bit of crapshoot and you'll can only look statistics long after the drives are obsolete.

As I wrote previously, I am looking at a price/reliability ratio. If the cheapest happens to be pretty reliable, great. But price isn't the only consideration.

 

[Laptopia]

Quote:

Originally Posted by tot /img/forum/go_quote.gif Reliability is hard to measure, seems to be a bit of crapshoot and you'll can only look statistics long after the drives are obsolete.

I believe that quality control can be evaluated by historical rates of failure.

 

[leftnose]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Robert Linthicum /img/forum/go_quote.gif I believe that quality control can be evaluated by historical rates of failure.

There was an article written by a few Google engineers about a year ago concerning the reliability of consumer level drives. Most of Google's server farms are run on low-end drives for cost reasons so Google has a lot of experience with cheap drives.

In the end, the article concluded that all manufacturer's drives were about equally reliable.

I'll see if I can find the article.

 

[tot]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Robert Linthicum /img/forum/go_quote.gif I believe that quality control can be evaluated by historical rates of failure.

You'll just find what how reliable the historical drives were, not what the current models are.

 

[leftnose]

Oops. I guess I totally mis-remember the article:

Quote:

Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages.... Our results do not contradict this fact.

Slashdot | Google Releases Paper on Disk Reliability

 

[infinitesymphony]

If your RAID is relatively fail-safe, just pick any drive with a decent warranty. For almost two decades, I've never had a hard drive fail (fingers crossed). Sure, some like the IBM DeskStar eventually developed bad sectors, but never a massive unforeseen failure.