Hello,
I want to dig deep and get to the truth about hard drives quality.
The question: Is there difference if I buy a Dell Server with their (Extrememly expensive) Hard drives OR I get the drive from Newegg.
And I'm not talking about desktop AS drives. I'm talking about Enterprise Seagate NS Drives.
See this:
"...Hard drive storage technologies is the core of what a server is all about, and isn't recommended as the place to start modifying. The majority of escalations I have to work involve issues with hard drives....and some of those are from people that wanted to save money by going 3rd party. Hard drives and tape drives have the most amount of moving parts, therefore they are most prone to failure. Period. If you have six drives instead of, say two, then your chances are greater that within the lifetime of that server you're going to see failures.
When you purchase a drive from us, you are purchasing drives that our engineers have QUALIFIED to run on our raid technologies. And no, this isn't just a simple "plug it in and see if it turns on" kind of test. Each drive you get from us will have modified firmware to properly accommodate our various controllers. This includes cache settings, timings (if you have timing issues, drives will false positively fall offline randomly), error correction, etc. Plus the newer SATA drives will be coming with a high MTBF (meantime between failure) rate than previous generations. In fact, the newer versions will have nearly 1 million runtime hours versus previous models that were 500,000 or less. I can almost personally guarantee that those 3rd party drives WILL NOT have that high of a MTBF rate.
Without going into a million examples, the bottomline is...if you buy 3rd party, you don't get warranty from us, and we have no ability to formally support those drives, and our diagnostics might not work. Meaning, if you have ANY problems with those drives, we cannot take those drives, perform engineering failure analysis, nor turn those drives into the original vendor (seagate, maxtor, hitachi, etc) and ask them to research the problem. You will likely experience some pushback in replacing the controller or cables, because your storage subsystem is not completely a Dell solution and you will be asked to purchase Dell qualified drives...." (source)
Is that true about modifying firmware? If I buy a Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST31000340NS drive for my RAID5 on Dell Server from Newegg, will it die faster than same drive from DELL? Barracuda ES.2 ST31000340NS claims to work 1.2 MLN hours (100> years? )
Please give me some thoughts and feedback?
Thank you!
(Edited long URL into hyperlink)
Message Edited by AlanM on
01-28-2008 07:31 AM
