Are Newer And Faster IDE Drives Troublesome? 48
viperjsw writes: "Earthweb is running an interesting article on how there seems to be a failing trend in newer 7,200 RPM IDE hard drives. I am the lead hardware engineer for my co with four thousand 7,200 RPM ATA100 Maxtor and IBM hard drives. I have not seen any failure trends, though failure rates are at about 5-10%. Are Earthweb's reports verifiable?"
Momentum and heat (Score:4, Informative)
Also, with a faster speed, the spin-up will be more harsh on those drives.
I wonder how the failure rates of 10,000 and 15,000 rpm SCSI drives compares to those of lesser speeds.
Re:Momentum and heat (Score:3)
Also, I wonder if cheap drives geared to home users have sloppier tolerances built into them, where some drives are just doomed to fail. For example, I recently bought a cheap 40GB drive that vibrates noticibly (and it worries me), but all the server-grade SCSI drives I've seen run real smoothly (no worries until the bearings start grinding after a few years).
Re:Momentum and heat (Score:1)
They have special requirements (Score:5, Informative)
I've been installing 7200 rpm IDE drives into servers and workstations for well over a year now, and the only complete failure I've had was one that didn't work from the start. I've had drive errors crop up from heat (put a fan in, seperate it from other equipment (don't sandwich it between the floppy and zip), etc) and from using a 40-wire IDE cable instead of the ata-100 80-wire cables.
FWIW, I've used Fujitsu until a few months ago, IBM, Maxtor, and few seagates. They have all been at the lower end of the price range ($99 wholesale - went from 10G to 20G and currently using 40G).
-Adam
Re:They have special requirements (Score:1, Informative)
My guess is that there's other engineering factors going into the heat equasion other than just the RPM number.
Re:They have special requirements (Score:4, Informative)
Cheap drives cut corners on motors, bearings, and well-engineered cases. So cool fast drives cost more money than cool slow drives or hot fast drives.
-Adam
scsi == price = price *4 (Score:2)
That is kind of a troll. This is done in almost all product. Thay are made as efficient as possible. And even expensive scisi drives fail. Thay are sometimes just the same as the cheap drive with the added scsi interface, and the price tag added.
if scsi then
price=price*4
end if.
Ok what is important:
-MTBF
-Service agreement ()
-Some technical specifations that are hidden deep in de documentation.
Re:They have special requirements (Score:2)
heat and noise problems (Score:2, Interesting)
Power Off/On (Score:1)
This is to be expected (Score:3, Informative)
However, there is a more troubling issue:
How is it that you can now buy a 40 gig hard drive for less than $100? Simple -- the manufacturer cuts corners on quality and cranks them out by the thousands in third world sweat-shops.
IBM is now putting disclaimers on some of their hard drives, not recommending operating them for more than 8 - 10 hours per day.
Re:This is to be expected (Score:3, Informative)
I'm probably a shitbrained assclown (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I'm probably a shitbrained assclown (Score:1)
What the hell does your company do? (Score:1)
Shit (Score:1)
Nice to meet you
The culprit... (Score:1, Redundant)
So, the real culprit is the old Metalic Bearings that are still used in some of these drives...
So, what's the big fuss about? Well, it would be like an automobile manufacturer making a car without airbags today (only without that whole life or death thing)...
Yes and no... (Score:2)
While some of this can be attributed to bad products, it makes you wonder, with hard dirives getting bigger, are more people speaking out with complaints because they loose more? Or are more hard drives getting sold than ever, thus increasing the number of incidents that there's flaws (same # damaged per million, just more millions sold)
Just my musings... never had a problem with my hard drives yet.
Bad experiences with IBM... (Score:1)
I had 2 out of 2 40gig Deskstars die (Score:1)
My Fujitsu 40gig is working still.
IDE Disks in General (Score:2, Interesting)
I've learned the hard way to cut corners somewhere else if you have to, but always buy SCSI drives.
I would take a Pentium 100 with SCSI disks over any Athlon/P4/whatever system with IDE disks. Spinning faster may make IDE disks fail sooner, but they're going to fail sooner anyway. The rule of thumb, I've found, is generally true: IDE drives are shoddily engineered, slow, and prone to failure. You get what you pay for.
SCSI disks aren't perfect, of course, but I would never trust anything important (much less a server of any significance) to IDE disks.
Re:IDE Disks in General (Score:2)
The reason you don't hear about SCSI failures is that the nunber in use compared to IDE is small due to the home PC explosion. I suspect the failure rate is the same, there's just a lot fewer SCSI drives out there.
Re:IDE Disks in General (Score:2)
Re:IDE Disks in General (Score:1)
For the most part that's not true anymore. Check the spec sheets. Also, check the warrantee length and the mfg MTBF numbers.
Re:IDE Disks in General (Score:2)
. . .
I once thought about what you say - same disks, different interfaces. Still, this doesn't explain the price differential, which is substantial between IDE and SCSI.
I've two answers to my own dilemma - either SCSI interface drives undergo far better tolerance checks and testing before they ship, which might explain a good deal of reliability or the drive manufacturers are gouging their SCSI customers.
I think that the real answer is a combination of the two factors. There's nothing wrong with many IDE drives (except the interface, for SCSI afficionados, of course) but SCSI drives have a much better record with everyone I've ever talked to. I bet most people with an important workstation of server consider the cost of SCSI (or FC/AL for that matter)drives a no - brainer as well as a small part of the overall machine cost / work performed value in any event. Companies and serious individuals are natural "suckers" for being sold robust but expensive kit. Just think in comparison a P4 Intel box versus a SUN Sunblade 2000. I know from experience that buying or building really nice Intel boxes soon shaves a whole load from the price advantage Intel has over other architectures.
I think the main comment I have is that IDE drives are majority sold to consumer markets (though I'd be interested to be corrected on that) whereas SCSI drives are mainly sold to a "professional" market. This really affects the whole price / quality focus of the manufacturers.
.
Re:IDE Disks in General (Score:2)
My theory was that when manufacturer QA'd the the drives, the ones that were perfect or close-to got to be SCSIs and the other ones that passed got to be IDEs. This makes a certain amount of sense, since most people who need serious reliability go for SCSI. IDE is generally used for desktop applications, where 24x7 reliability isn't really a factor, and while restoring from backup (you *do* have backups, right?) is a PITA, it's probably not going to lose you several million dollars of revenue, or whatever. Not to mention that, arguably, the stress on a workstation drive will be lower than that on a server (personally, I think the power cycling might negate this, not to mention that anyone with half a brain has their servers on conditioned power, whereas one cannot say the same about workstations, esspecially home ones) so failure rate for marginal drives might still be lower, and one desktop user isn't likely to ever sue you for one crashed drive, where there is that possibility if a significant percentage of server drives fail prematurely in a company's server farm.
But I have no evidence to back me up on this one. I didn't really care that much (all I cared about was: don't use the IDEs for the servers!)
Another theory might be that the SCSIs are made at a different plant and thus the QA or something else is causing them to ultimately be of higher quality.
*shrug*
I want last year's model (Score:4, Interesting)
Where would I find reliability ratings for disks?
Actually, for me, two year old models should be fine. 40 Gbytes is way more than I need for most of my systems. But, I want a new drive, not one that's been sitting on a shelf for 18 months. An old drive probably has some new failure modes, hardening of the lubricants or something.
Re:I want last year's model (Score:2)
The survey is currently down for maintenance, but whenever it comes back up, just go to this page, [storagereview.com] sign up, and browse the results. Of course, some of them probably haven't been updated in a while, so you may not get the most reliable info, but it's still better than info that was published at the same time the drive came out.
HDD failure due to mounting angle (Score:3, Interesting)
Manufacturer specifications always state that drives must be mounted horizontal or vertical, but who ever pays any attention to the manufacturer....
Similarly for CD and DVD drives - are there any potential problems with mounting these drives at an angle? I have played around with mounting drives at angle; the drive trays etc seem to work fine when the drive is on an angle, but it is difficult to test long term performance or failure likelyhood when you only have one drive to play with.
The reason I'm interested: I'm working on a case mod, but it looks like I will have to mount the drives at wierd angles to accomodate the case geometry...
Thanks,
Russ Magee %-)
Re:HDD failure due to mounting angle (Score:3, Informative)
Those drives, no. Some 5 1/4 inch drives needed to be reformatted if you mounted them a different way. All the 8 inch drives were like that. I've never seen a 14 inch drive mounted anyway but horizontal. It would be bad.
As the disk drive arms get shorter, the less the angle matters. I've never heard of a laptop disk crashing because someone turned the laptop on its side.
Re:HDD failure due to mounting angle (Score:2)
So much for IBM quality...
My failure (Score:2)
All this in 6 months time.
I can also hear my geforce fan dying too
You get what you pay for.... (Score:2)
--Heat--
I've seen a lot of posts about adequate cooling but sometimes there can be too much cooling.
Heat is accounted for and used in higher speed drives. It's use? Thermal viscocity breakdown.
I don't know what type of lubrication the drives use, but i'm about %100 positive it's made from silicone. Silicone grease doesn't conduct so if it leaks it won't cause any problems with the underlying circutry. We all know this from CPU fans.
What I'm saying is, you have a sealed bearing system on these drives. They use silicone grease. It has to get hot in order for it to *break down*. I am guessing that there is a certain point where chemically this stuff goes from grease to liquid.
When you're spinning at 7200 or 10,000 RPM's I would think that the bearing would need something non grease like, as in more liquidy to maintain those speeds.
Now before I get modded off as troll ask yourself, how many of these top of the line hard drive technologies have I actually worked with? Have high end SCSI drives allways been hot? Yes! It is by design, not by defect and people should really jump to conclusions about it. Your best bet lies in placement which I am about to cover.
--Placement--
I learned this from a ex fujitsu hard drive support person. If you are looking for someone to support you hard drives or other similiar products lemme know I can hook you up.
Placement of the drives is very important. Picture this... You have a small head, about the size of a match and it's floating on a cushion of air no wider than a few humans hairs thick. Think about all the laws of physics to make that trick work. Funny, we just had an article about a spinning disk creating gravimetric distortions. Anyways the drive's are engineered to be reliable at any 90degree angle. Anything other than that and you're asking for it
RAID it (Score:2)
I can't affort those $2000 DLT tapes or to spend many hours feeding 10-20 CDRW to do backups, this is the most convenient solution.
Re:RAID it (Score:1)
What are the chances that both drives would die within hours of each other...
Problem is the average Consumer (Score:1)
Personally, in the last year I've had more trouble with hard drives than the last fifteen years. I think it sucks!
Re:Problem is the average Consumer (Score:1)
I have to agree with you. I have 3 drives RMAed right now including an IBM 40GB that is 6 months old. I'm seriously looking into RAID, SCSI or both. I'm real gun shy with IBM right now.
7200 rpm IDE hard drives..... (Score:2)
drivers can actually be wrong (Score:1)
So maybe many UDMA drivers are not up to date. Especially High-Point Tech (which Abit and others use) have many Beta-drivers which I do not trust completely.`
Cooling hard drives... (Score:1)
I tried google, and the closest thing I found was the The coolermaster Cool Drive [heatsink-guide.com], which seems to be crippled by the need to stay in a single 5.25" bay, and therefore probably dosen't supply anywhere near enough airflow space or fin area.
Re:Cooling hard drives... (Score:2)
i think that you are looking for something like this [hardcorecooling.com]. $13.95, you can probably check pricewatch.com [pricewatch.com] and find it cheaper or others like it.
hope this helps.