Failure rates

David Ecklein dave at diacad.com
Tue Apr 26 17:52:00 EDT 2005


Yes, I have heard from others about Maxtors having high failure rates
lately.  They formerly were my favorite.  I still use them, but have been
trying Hitachis lately with good luck so far.

As I wrote before, these various brands wax and wane in quality.

I think one of the problems has been the industry upgrade from 5400 rpm to
7200 rpm on the mass market drives.  The 72s draw more current, running
hotter, in addition to the higher speed challenging the bearing system.  The
HD is obviously the part that moves most in any computer, unless you count
the fans.

Speaking of fans, you never outgrow your need for them.  I now routinely
stick one or two extra ones in new computers, and try to talk up their
advantages to clients when I have their machines open.  Heat might be the
biggest killer of computer hardware next to obsolescence itself.

Dave E.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul Lussier" <p.lussier at comcast.net>
To: "Benjamin Scott" <dragonhawk at iname.com>
Cc: "Greater NH Linux User Group" <gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2005 8:28 AM
Subject: Re: Failure rates


> Benjamin Scott <dragonhawk at iname.com> writes:
>
> > On Apr 24 at 11:43pm, David Ecklein wrote:
> >> My bad impression had only been with Samsung hard drives, and that
> >> is dated and limited to my own small computer business activity, not
> >> "anecdotes". Failure rate was higher than any other brand I had
> >> used.
> >
> >     An interesting phenomenon has been observed when it comes to the
> >     public's perception of reliability of commodity brands:  The more
> >     units sold, the more units fail, in terms of absolute numbers.
> >     Thus, a given brand of something will become popular to the point
> >     where it becomes "first choice".  Then, because there are so many
> >     of them out there, people begin to see more failures in that
> >     brand.  People thus conclude there must be something wrong with
> >     that brand.  Opinion drops, and the product falls out of first
> >     place, confirming to everyone that there was something wrong.
>
> This very much applies to hard drive manufacturers.  Though, because
> there are really on 3 or 4 of them, this phenomenon presents itself in
> a round-robin fashion.
>
> Currently I'm seeing the most failures with Maxtor, on average, about
> 1 drive a week.  I've RMA'ed well over 50 drives in the past 6 months
> or so.  That figure may seem high, until you look at the numbers I'm
> dealing with: Over 300 systems, many of which 2 drives, 50 or more
> have 4 drives.  I probably have over 1000 drives in this place, so in
> theory, 1 per week isn't unrealistic, and is probably well below the
> advertised MTBF as well.
>
> Ironically, my understanding is that WD and Seagate both have *higher*
> failure rates currently, though, since I have far fewer drives from
> them, I see significantly fewer failures.
> -- 
>
> Seeya,
> Paul
> _______________________________________________
> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
>





More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list