[wplug] OT - word of warning on Maxtor 250GB drives

[Florin Manolache]

Sorry to have caused so much controversy. Here are some more facts 
about my original message.

We run a large pool of Linux computers and servers here. About half of 
them are built by us. They have a very large range of hardware 
configuration, ages, working conditions (loads, temperature).
Every year or so we do some sampling of the current disk models on the 
market and the rest of the year we stick more or less with the models we 
found to be the best.

It might be surprising, but we found large variation in the quality
and reliability of the same disk models from one year to the other.
The general trend is that a certain model tends to be better when
it is launched, then the quality decreases as the model ages.
E.g a WD2500 manufactured in 2003 was importantly more reliable than a 
WD2500 manufactured in early 2005. My guess is that a certain model is 
manufactured at different plants as it ages, every jump from one plant to 
the other meaning some more corner cuts.

Usually our sampling method worked very well over time, giving a good 
prediction of the quality of the disks we were buying (combined with 
good backup policies never ever lost one bit of data).

So, at different moments in time, disks of different sizes can be 
statistically better or worse and the comparison of a 3 year old
Maxtor (when they had pretty reliable large size models) with a current
Maxtor of the same size and (almost) same model number is meaningless.
I wouldn't buy any of the two anyways :-)

And, as somebody else was pointing out here, we found that bad packing
of OEM disks is the most important cause of low disk reliability.
In my experience newegg.com excels in that sorts of bad practice.
Retail boxes or large batches is the way to go with such vendors.

Florin Manolache

On Tue, 14 Feb 2006, Jason Carr wrote:

> Neither are indicative of poor quality.  In order to test you'd have to
> have different machines with different motherboards, different power
> supplies, and different service loads.  Maybe you push your drives too
> hard in a non-ventilated area that is overpowered.  Maybe you just
> bought a bad batch.