[BNM] Reliable hard disks

[PC HELP Brighton]

Its a bit of a lottery with HDD's according to Google research and also my own personal experience. Speak to data recovery companies as well, and you'll find that there is no real correlation between brand and MTBF. WD do make good hdd's, but if the heads go on one of these babies, it can be very hard work finding another head match, compared to some other vendors. 

Enterprise level drives are supposed to have a greater MTBF, so the best thing you can do, is look for a model that classes itself under this category.

RAID 0 is great for speed and capacity, but as you are striping the data across two or more drives, if one of them goes, you are f***ed. The motto is backup backup backup. RAID 0 with good onsite and offsite backup (I use Carbonite), will give you the best of both worlds. 

There are other options too .. look into RAID 5 is sometimes a good compromise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_5

Steve

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From: andrew holway 
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 8:34 PM
To: Brighton New Media 
Subject: [BNM] Reliable hard disks


Does anyone have any data on desktop hard drive reliability. I want to
replace the 36 GB disks in RAID 0 with something like 2 500GB disks.

ta

Andy
-- 

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