Re: [gentoo-user] Seagate hard drives with dual actuators.

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2024 at 3:33 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> I've had a Seagate, a Maxtor from way back and a Western Digital go bad.  This is one reason I don't knock any drive maker.  Any of them can produce a bad drive.

++

All the consumer drive manufacturers are in a super-price-conscious
market.  For the most part their drives work as advertised, and
basically all of them have made a model with an abysmal failure rate
at some point.  I think Backblaze still publishes their stats and I
don't think any manufacturer stood out when it comes to these cheaper
consumer drives.  The enterprise stuff probably is more reliable, but
for HDD I don't think it is worth it - just use RAID.

I've personally been trying to shift towards solid state.  Granted, it
is about double the price of large 5400RPM drives, but the performance
is incomparable.  I've also been moving more towards used enterprise
drives with PLP/etc and where I can find the drive endurance info on
the ebay listing.  You can typically pay about $50/TB for an
enterprise SSD - either SATA or NVMe.  You'll pay a bit more if you
want a high capacity drive (U.2 16+TB or whatever).  That's in part
because I've been shifting to Ceph which is pretty IOPS-sensitive.
However, it is nice that when I add/replace a drive the cluster
rebuilds in an hour at most with kinda shocking network IO.

I'll use cheap consumer SATA/M.2 SSDs for OS drives that are easily
reimaged.  I'll use higher performance M.2 for gaming rigs (mostly
read-oriented), and back it up.  Be aware that the consumer write
benchmarks only work for short bursts and fall to a fraction of the
advertisement for sustained writes - the enterprise write benchmarks
reflect sustained writes and you can run at that speed until the drive
dies.

-- 
Rich