Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3996 mails)

[Chuck Stuettgen <cstuettgen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2004-09-03 at 16:18, Greg Freemyer wrote:
>  >>  I used to work at a large community college where I supported several
>  >>  hundred Gateway 2000 machines, both in labs and as instructor
>  >>  workstations.
>  >>  They all used WD drives.  I replaced a hard drive about once every 2-3
>  >>  weeks (not to mention the other crap hardware Gateway uses).
> 
>  >>  I will never own a Gateway 2K computer or another WD drive.  Others may
>  >>  have different experience, but my unique background formed *my* unique
>  >>  opinion. :)
> 
>  >>  --Danny
> 
> I'm not hardware reliability expert, but with "several hundred" machines only one every 2-3 weeks sounds pretty reliable to me.
> 
> ie.
> MTBF = 5 years for a good disk drive
> = 5 * 52 wks
> = 260 wks   (MTBF per drive)
> 
> You had "several hundred" machines, so the projected failure rate should have been closer to one per week.
> 
> Greg

While that sounds reasonable, the fact remains that after you replace
the WD drive with another brand. The overall HD failure rate decreases? 

Like Danny, my staff maintains about 400 computers.  Last year we
purchased 200 Dell Optiplex GX270's - 25 units at a time.  Over the
course of the year they came with either a WD, Hitachi, Maxtor or
Seagate drive.  All of those machines were deployed by the end of
September so have been in use for a minimum of 1 year. Every time we
have had a HD failure in one of those machines it has been either a WD
or Hitachi drive.   We replace the failed drive with a Seagate drive.

When we return the failed drive to Dell for warranty replacement we
always get back the same brand that failed. Which we only use in
machines that are used for testing or in non-critical utility machines
that have a static configuration and recovery of the machine involves
simply replacing the failed HD and restoring an image of the
configuration and rebooting.