MTBF: Seagate vs... Hitachi?

[3030vision]

For a while now i've been leaning very heavily towards drives that indicate MTBF ratings. I'd rather spend a little more money up front for the security of having my data safe. That was part of my rationale for my last Seagate Barracuda purchase.

Now that i'm looking for a new SATA drive, i'm checking out the competition a bit. I'm seeing good things regarding some Hitachi and Samsung drives, but i'm not willing to sacrifice performance for security. I haven't been able to find any MTBF ratings for the Hitachi drives. Is there a general concensus that MTBF is a pretty good indication of reliability?

Anyway, i get the feeling that a lot of people here lean towards Seagate also, perhaps for the same reasons. Perhaps i should just go with the old standby

Thanks!

PS Do the new Seagate Barracude SATA drives use fluid dynamic bearings?
PPS I guess everyone's had a bad experience, but i had a Maxtor drive fail on me like 10 years ago and i haven't forgiven them since!

 

[folken]

I've lost a drive from everyone but seagate. The only dead seagate I've seen came broken, the pcb looked like it had been shanked w/ a screw driver and there was a hole in the box to back that up. I've had to many bad IBM deathstar experiences to go w/ a hitachi drive, even if the new ones are vastly superior.

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

 

[sjonnie]

Manufacturers do not generally publish the MTBF for non-enterprise class drives. If you have MTBF data for the 7200.8 series I'd love to see it. However, a higher MTBF is not an indication about the time at which any one particular drive will fail. MTBFs are usefull only for large arrays of drives. Say a company wants to set up an array of 100 drives, they'd like to know how often they are likely to need to replace a drive and how many hot spares to keep on hand.

Data security comes from having backups, not from having a drive with a 5yr warranty. The only reasonable method of online data security is an implementation of RAID1. Other than that you need to rely on automatic backups to tape.

Almost all drives use FDB these days. Currently I've lost drives from Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital. That doesn't make any of them suspect or means Hitachi drives are not, it simply means own enough drives and eventually one will fail, no matter who made it. Anecdotal evidence doesn't really cut the mustard when it comes to drive reliability.

 

[Guest]

good points!

Thought the 5 year warranty is always soemthing nice to have and kinda speaks for itself...

Asus P4P800DX, P4C 2.6ghz@3.25ghz, 2X512 OCZ PC4000 3-4-4-8, MSI 6800Ultra stock, 2X30gig Raid0

 

[RichPLS]

IMO it's different with nowdays HDDs carrying 5yr warranty, HDDs just don't fail!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But standards do fail, so we have to be carefull about who we deal with and make sure they will honor stated warranty.
Basically, make sure you buy from a reputable manufacturer who will honor the warranty.

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