[mythtv-users] BE Disk / Filesystem Layout

[David Brodbeck]

Brian Wood wrote:
> I have personally never had a Fuji drive fail on me, and I have had  
> several Seagate and Maxtor units fail, but the sample size is way too  
> low to be statistically valid, and even the drives that failed gave  
> me many months of reliable service.
>   

The only Seagate drive I've had fail was abused.  (Laptop, it was
dropped.)  I've had two Maxtor drives fail, but they were being run at
the very top edge of their temperature specs, so arguably they were
abused as well.  One of those failures was a factory refurb that failed
after two months, which interests me because Google's white paper
suggests that "infant mortality" is a very real phenomenon with hard
disks.  (Their failure graph had a distinct dip at 1 year.)

In the past Western Digital drives have often impressed me with their
ability to seemingly live forever.  I've seen them last upwards of ten
years.  But I've also seen drives from brands with poor reputations,
like Quantum, do the same.

Like you, I feel like my sample size is too small to draw any real
conclusions.  Disk failures are relatively rare events so most of us
don't get to see a statistically significant number of them.