Message-ID: <4B8DB56B.3070905@2ndquadrant.com>
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:03:39 -0500
From: Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com>
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To: Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@gmail.com>
CC: david@lang.hm, Francisco Reyes <lists@stringsutils.com>,
	Pgsql performance <pgsql-performance@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: 10K vs 15k rpm for analytics
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Scott Marlowe wrote:
> We've had REAL good luck with the WD green and black drives.  Out of
> about 35 or so drives we've had two failures in the last year, one of
> each black and green.

I've been happy with almost all the WD Blue drives around here (have 
about a dozen in service for around two years), with the sole exception 
that the one drive I did have go bad has turned into a terrible liar.  
Refuses to either acknowledge it's broken and produce an RMA code, or to 
work.  At least the Seagate and Hitachi drives are honest about being 
borked when once they've started producing heavy SMART errors.  I have 
enough redundancy to deal with failure, but can't tolerate dishonesty 
one bit.

The Blue drives are of course regular crappy consumer models though, so 
this is not necessarily indicative of how the Green/Black drives work.

> The Seagate SATA drives have been horrific for
> us, with a 30% failure rate in the last 8 or so months.  We only have
> something like 10 of the Seagates, so the sample's not as big as the
> WDs.    Note that we only use the supposed "enterprise" class drives
> from each manufacturer.
>
> We just got a shipment of 8 1.5TB Seagates so I'll keep you informed
> of the failure rate of those drives.  Wouldn't be surprised to see 1
> or 2 die in the first few months tho.
>   

Good luck with those--the consumer version of Seagate's 1.5TB drives 
have been perhaps the worst single drive model on the market over the 
last year.  Something got seriously misplaced when they switched their 
manufacturing facility from Singapore to Thailand a few years ago, and 
now that the old plant is gone:  
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/04/seagate_closing_singapore_plant/ 
I don't expect them to ever recover from that. 

-- 
Greg Smith  2ndQuadrant US  Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg@2ndQuadrant.com   www.2ndQuadrant.us