[mythtv-users] How is this pricing possible?

Raymond Wagner raymond at wagnerrp.com
Wed Feb 23 15:15:34 UTC 2011


On 2/23/2011 09:43, Dan Armbrust wrote:
>> Most current SATA drives on the market are flawed. I the expectation
>> is 1% to 7% of all your drives will fail each year. And the failures
>> do not always have anything to do with old age or usage. Out of 100 to
>> 200 drives I have at work I sent back RMAs on 6 to 8 and had 5 other
>> failures last year. Most of the RMAs were from drives that were less
>> than 3 years old. This year I have RMD'd 3 drives, had a DOA and 1
>> more drive ready to RMA.
>>
>> John
> I completely concur... drives these days are shit  They are dirt
> cheap.  But they are horrible for longevity.  I would say my failure
> rates are even higher than 10% within the warranty period.

I don't really think this is a new phenomenon.  I've not experienced any 
significant change in drive reliability since I started buying up hard 
drives and ripping my movies around ten years ago.  I have far more 
drives now, so it follows I have far more failures, but at least to me 
the rate seems about the same.  If anything made a difference, it's 
because I've been using a hardware RAID card for about four years and I 
replace drives as soon as the card boots them.  Had I been using 
independent disks, I would have kept it around, and would not have even 
been aware of what was probably just a transient blip on an otherwise 
good drive.

> Once you accept that your drives will fail, and will fail early... you
> will make proper arrangements for it... and then it won't bother you
> when the inevitable happens.  Just buy the drives with the longest
> warranty, and expect to use it.

What for?  When you're buying large amounts of hard drives, there's no 
such thing as 'good enough', merely 'good enough for now'.  What much 
worth is a five-year warranty?  What are you going to be using that 
drive for five years from now?  Five years ago, 500GB drives were the 
biggest things out there.  300 and 320GB drives were the sweet spot 
around $100-$120 per drive.  A 300GB drive will get you maybe 40 hours 
of recording, or 10 movies.  It's not worth the port on the controller.  
Following the move from transcoded divx/avi to h264/mkv, and ISOs, and 
m2ts files, with an ever increasing collection, I'm hurting for space 
before the end of a three-year warranty.  I have a drawer full of 
operational drives with no purpose because I don't need the boot drives 
and they're too small for bulk storage.  I'll be dumping a lot of 750GBs 
in there in the near term for the same reason.


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