[mythtv-users] OT: Seagate to reduce warranties on consumer drives to 3 years from 2009

[jarpublic at gmail.com]

>
>
> ah, I always just lived by the "cheaper" rule. Decide what features I
> want, buy the cheapest drive. I've since been vindicated, Google's
> extensive hard drive report has shown no statistical difference
> amongst manufacturers and models (obviously outside issues like the
> "deathstar" and the current Seagate 1.5TB model debacle). As such one
> will currently find a mix of Samsung, Seagate, Maxtor, WD and Toshiba
> drives in my 3 Myth computers, my laptop and my two external drives. I
> also currently have 8 drives (1xSeagate, 1xToshiba, 4xMaxtor, 2xWD)
> well out of their warranty period that all are running with no errors,
> weird noises, etc. That I believe is due to them running in a very
> well ventilated case with a quality power supply on UPS and a little
> bit of luck.
>

Actually Google's study did say that failure rates were highly correlated
with the model and manufacturer. Unfortunately for us, they didn't name any
specific manufacturers or models in their report. From the report:

"Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive
models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do
not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes
significantly when we normalize failure rates per each
drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by
drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a
breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage
due to the proprietary nature of these data."

The interesting thing from the report was that higher temperatures and heavy
usage didn't seem to correlate with a higher failure rates regardless of
manufacturer. The report is short and easy to read or just skim over if
anybody wants to look more closely:
http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf.
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