[GRLUG] Enterprise hard drives

[Tim Schmidt]

On 4/4/07, David Pembrook <david at pembrook.net> wrote:
> I must say in defense of the warranty... I sent in a dead 160 and got a
> nice 250 back.. better than the trash can. You'll find cheep drives with
> less than 3 years, try 1 year.

I haven't ever purchased a drive with a 1 year warranty, and I buy
_cheap_ drives.  Almost all manufacturers have 1 year warranty drives,
but none carry them exclusively, and they all fight price wars.  It's
typical to look at the 5 or 6 drives that match your cost / size
parameters and find 2 or 3 with one year warranties, the rest with 3.
The 3s are often just as inexpensive, if not cheaper than the 1s.
I'll wager this holds true for everything but the rock bottom, single
platter, meant-for-oem-system-builder 40Gb drives at the very bottom
of the price curve.

> I won't argue the hardware vs software raid but I'm sure I could find a
> suitable page on the net with just as many arguments against software
> raid.

You won't find one written by the Linux kernel SATA maintainer.

--tim