Stress Testing Hard Drives

[Phil Thayer]

What happens with the disk drive manufacturers is that they will test
the HD as part of the last step in the manufacturing process.  They will
classify them as to their reliability.  The drives with the best
reliability results will be sold as drives for SAN products.  The drives
with reliability in the mid range are used for mid range servers and the
drives with the lowest reliability are used for home PC/consumer market.

So, if you have a SAN and you go to your local PC store and buy a 500GB
SATA drive and put it into the drive cradle for the SAN and try to load
that drive into the SAN it will quickly be rejected.

If you were to purchase a SAN drive and take the HD out of the SAN drive
cradle and use it on your PC/Server/Whatever you will have a much more
reliable disk drive.

Phil
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: kclug-bounces at kclug.org 
> [mailto:kclug-bounces at kclug.org] On Behalf Of Charles Steinkuehler
> Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2007 4:34 PM
> To: Billy Crook
> Cc: kclug at kclug.org
> Subject: Re: Stress Testing Hard Drives
> 
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> 
> Billy Crook wrote:
> > I think they should lable hard drives with their halflife.
> 
> No hard scientific evidence here, but anecdotal accounts show the
> new(ish) 500-Gig SATA drives have a *MUCH* shorter half-life than the
> previous generation of 250-Gig drives.
> 
> The company I work for (NewTek) is shipping pre-configured 
> video editing
> systems, and the latest includes a 500-Gig drive.  They half-life (ie:
> blink out of existence) so quickly I had difficulty finding 
> enough units
> to stress-test the imaging system.  Of course, the inventory system
> indicated there were plenty available...
> 
> Other items with short half-lives:
> - - Oscilloscope probes (Why are they called 10:1 probes?  
> Because they
> ten(d) to one(run) away! <groan>).
> - - Sticks of DRAM
> - - Miniature screwdrivers
> - - Favorite pens/pencils
> 
> - --
> Charles Steinkuehler
> charles at steinkuehler.net
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