I have some more information, that I want to post, even if you don't use it now... . First is on HD manufacturer reliability. Please look at the charts (they have them by quarter), but this one seems to show the last 3 years (2015-2017): https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175089-who-makes-the-most-reliable-hard-... I am hoping to get this off quickly, so excused any raw wording -- but the manfacturer with the worst reliabilty (and not just over the past 3 years, this has been true since at least 2000 and probably going back to 1990 and before). Out of the manufacturers that are still around today, Seagate has consistently been near the bottom in quality. The chart shows Seagate shows annualized failure rates as high as 29.08%. Most are under 3%, but it seems to have, _nearly_ above 1%/year for listed drives. Second worst is WDC -- though I believe some of their newer drives (not seen in the above chart, but in some quarterly charts), that may be benefitting from their purchase of the Hitachi (HGST) business. In this chart, Hitachi has the lowest failure rate followed by Toshiba. This chart doesn't show disks by other manufacturers. The info about Hitachi (which was first to offer 5year warranties on their enterprise drives -- still do), I knew before seeing this chart. They consistently have had the highest quality. Conversely -- at least for enterprise drives, Seagate has consistently had the worst.
From the little I've seen, Seagate drives are often as expensive as Hitachi often more. So do yourself a favor and go with Hitachi's.
I have another post about RAIDs that I'm searching in my archives for. I'll get back to looking for it, but want to send this one off sooner rather than later. Drive manufacturers DO make a difference. If you don't want headaches go w/Enterprise Hitachi drives (Ultrastars). I can't speak for their consumer line's longevity, as I never had them long enough to know, but as I wrote earlier, their consumer drives were more likely to have a fairly wide spread on RPMs. -l -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org