is this consumer grade SAS now or enterprise SATA? you have to decide now. sorry if that's a first for you (you as in we, the IT forum guys)
could this be due to the easiness of just slapping different PCBs on top of an otherwise identical block of alloy with a motor and some platters in it?
or are you still claiming, that this won't be the exact same mechanical parts in this drive? and running it on SATA will cause worse reliability in terms of endurance? uh huh...
don't get me wrong. I am not denying that there is in fact a big difference in quality betwen certain types of drives. for sure there is, and that's why there are technical specification and warranties and stuff. also no offense meant, but please try stop talking this down to an interface as source of distinguishing truth. it simply isn't. we don't do that on IT forums. we rather stick to facts. ;-)
Fair points. Though I'd say that warranty is primarily a marketing tool and often has not much to do with durability and reliability.
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@bikegremlin said: Fair points. Though I'd say that warranty is primarily a marketing tool and often has not much to do with durability and reliability.
I agree to some extend. however, if a manufacturer trusts his own work to give 10 years vs 2 years on a different product, I tend to believe that this is not always only marketing :-)
pretty sure the warranty will not depend on it being a SAS or SATA drive though ;-)
@itsdeadjim When you figure what you want for HDDs, let me know! I've got 1000's of pre-owned HDDs in stock. 4TB, 6TB, 8TB, etc. All tested 95-100% Health, with varying amount of POH. I have both SAS and SATA btw.
@Falzo said:
people seem to lack understanding common (spinning) hard drive technology more and more these days. lots of assumption and claims without further clarification.
sorry, but where do things like
Normally they fail after 5+ years of operation...
or
Definitely go with SAS, little more noisy ( as in a server who cares ) but definitely more reliable.
do come from?
harddisks usually have a very long life. also apart from electronic/controller issues they tend to die rather slow and not instantly opposed to pure chip based storage ;-) I would not put any generic number of years to any of this but maybe that's just me?
for the difference between SATA and SAS, what makes for the claim of SAS being more reliable? as pointed out the interface is different. but that does not mean the mechanical parts have to be.
bad sectors usually are a rather physical issue and do not depend on the interface itself. so SAS alone does not say much about that in terms of reliability...
if you however meant to say that SAS drives usually are of enterprise quality, which are built for another durability then this might be more right. but keep in mind, that there are also enterprise graded SATA drives, so again the claim that SAS perse is better than SATA does not fit well here I'd say.
for the 13 yo drive, of course this quite an age. if the sectors are good as shown I don't see any reason to mistrust that device at all.
the only thing that comes to mind regarding very old, long running disks is some wearout on the motor that sometimes can lead to these disks not wanting to spin up anymore.
if a 3.5" 640GB drive is useful for anything at all is a different topic though, I guess...
In my experience, HDDs tend to have a higher failure rate after 5 years of operation. This is what we saw in our previous company and was from a large sample size. Do note that the drives were used in moving industrial machinery so failure could be higher with those. The 5 years were calculated from the "head flying hours" or "power on hours" and the machines were operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a week. Thus I will not trust a hard drive with my data after 5 years of continuous operation in high demand environment where data is continuously read/written do the drives. Servers and video recorders (DVR/NVR) falls under this category.
Ofcourse if you only lightly or occationally use the drive, it lasts much longer. If your primary OS storage is SSD and use HDD for backups or something, it doesn't get used (or spin up) even if you keep your PC powered on.
In rare cases, HDDs will last much longer then 5 years, similarly, it may fail after 1 to 2 years of operation. However I am speaking about the bell curve i noticed for HDDs in Singapore. The peak is at 5 years of operation for my observation.
@remy said:
I don't think it's easy to measure the reliability of a hard drive.
Because power on hours isn't enough.
You also need the amount of data read / written.
But even that's not enough. Because depending on the type of data stored, if it's large data sets with essentially sequential read / write it wouldn't have the same impact as reading / writing a lot of small files.
And it depends on how fragmented the data is.
You need to know the number of movements made by the hard disk drive's read head.
Otherwise I only have one drive that is powered 24 hours a day : Travelstar Z5K1000
It's been working for a few years on my personal server, but it's not really used that much, so...
In fact, I'd like to replace it with a 4TB drive. So he'll probably be replaced before he dies.
But since the data on it is so uncritical. I'm waiting to find a good price, or even to find a second-hand one
Exactly. Head flying hours is a good estimate here, but in the end, every drive is different and may not follow the trend. So don't care about non-important data and backup your important data
Btw, if you can, get a SSD for the OS partition and leave the HDD as /home2 (linux) or D : drive (windows) for data storage. It makes the server a little faster and increases the longevity of your HDDs.
@Falzo said:
people seem to lack understanding common (spinning) hard drive technology more and more these days. lots of assumption and claims without further clarification.
sorry, but where do things like
Normally they fail after 5+ years of operation...
do come from?
This is what we saw in our previous company and was from a large sample size. Do note that the drives were used in moving industrial machinery so failure could be higher with those. The 5 years were calculated from the "head flying hours" or "power on hours" and the machines were operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a week.
Thansk for elaborating! This context makes your statement much more reasonable. I totally agree that the reliability especially for mechanical device with moving parts heavily depends on the environment it has to work in and the physical conditions that come with it.
Comments
Fair points. Though I'd say that warranty is primarily a marketing tool and often has not much to do with durability and reliability.
Relja of House Novović, the First of His Name, King of the Plains, the Breaker of Chains, WirMach Wolves pack member
BikeGremlin's web-hosting reviews
I agree to some extend. however, if a manufacturer trusts his own work to give 10 years vs 2 years on a different product, I tend to believe that this is not always only marketing :-)
pretty sure the warranty will not depend on it being a SAS or SATA drive though ;-)
@itsdeadjim When you figure what you want for HDDs, let me know! I've got 1000's of pre-owned HDDs in stock. 4TB, 6TB, 8TB, etc. All tested 95-100% Health, with varying amount of POH. I have both SAS and SATA btw.
In my experience, HDDs tend to have a higher failure rate after 5 years of operation. This is what we saw in our previous company and was from a large sample size. Do note that the drives were used in moving industrial machinery so failure could be higher with those. The 5 years were calculated from the "head flying hours" or "power on hours" and the machines were operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a week. Thus I will not trust a hard drive with my data after 5 years of continuous operation in high demand environment where data is continuously read/written do the drives. Servers and video recorders (DVR/NVR) falls under this category.
Ofcourse if you only lightly or occationally use the drive, it lasts much longer. If your primary OS storage is SSD and use HDD for backups or something, it doesn't get used (or spin up) even if you keep your PC powered on.
In rare cases, HDDs will last much longer then 5 years, similarly, it may fail after 1 to 2 years of operation. However I am speaking about the bell curve i noticed for HDDs in Singapore. The peak is at 5 years of operation for my observation.
Exactly. Head flying hours is a good estimate here, but in the end, every drive is different and may not follow the trend. So don't care about non-important data and backup your important data
Btw, if you can, get a SSD for the OS partition and leave the HDD as /home2 (linux) or D : drive (windows) for data storage. It makes the server a little faster and increases the longevity of your HDDs.
Artificial intelligence is no match for our natural stupidity.
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
Thansk for elaborating! This context makes your statement much more reasonable. I totally agree that the reliability especially for mechanical device with moving parts heavily depends on the environment it has to work in and the physical conditions that come with it.
I've never rented a server with such an old disk.
No reallocated sectors
Some values seem crazy. That sounds like a lot to me, not sure about the veracity.
This is a desktop hard disk from the mass-market range.
Impressive