Harddrive failure rates

[DBissett]

I'm shopping harddrives for my next build and am concerned about failure rates. The machine is for business use and I'm not interested in down time. From the reviews at Newegg it appears that the larger drives, say 250-500 gigs, have a high incidence of complaints about DOA drives and quick failures after installs. Smaller drives, say up to WD's 160 gig size, have very few such complaints. From the comments they run cooler, so maybe this is the reason. Does anyone know if this is really true, i.e. that the larger drives fail more often and the smaller ones are more reliable? Also, is there a type of drive different from the standard consumer eSata drives that has higher reliability in general? Is there any source I can go to that has actual failure rates listed? Thanks.

Dave

 

[Modelworks]

Scsi drives have lower failure rates, but be prepared to pay more for less storage space.
Scsi drives are targetted at servers so they are built to a different standard than ide/sata drives. Its more than just the interface, thats why the cost is so high.

 

[gchanjam]

First of all, don't take Newegg reviews very seriously as anyone can go in and write whatever they want.

Second, if it is for a serious business, you really should be looking at SCSI drives and the like as that is what they are made for.

Finally, I haven't heard of a particular size failing more than any other but if you are worried about HD failure, just back your stuff up and even if one drive does fail, you should be back up in no time.

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: DBissett
Is there any source I can go to that has actual failure rates listed? Thanks. Dave

As I recall, just about every HDD model has an MTBF number in the detailed specs. User data is empirical and varies from user to user, and is subjective.

The HDD's warranty is a fairly realistic way of judging.

A recent study concludes that MTBFs are highly exaggerated, and generally could be divided by a factor of 15.

MTBF

 

[DBissett]

That's an interesting study. I remembered seeing it some time ago but had forgotten about it....not only were the MTBF numbers wildly exaggerated but the study also found no real difference in the failure rates across drive types, e.g. sata and scsi drives.

Dave