Re: [PLUG] New Hard Drive Testing Practices

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Tue, Jul 13, 2021 at 11:08 AM Mark Bergman via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
>
> We used to see about 5~10% failures on external USB hard drives, from a similar size sample. I suspect power supplies more than physical damage (ie., the drive
> being knocked off the desk while it's spinning). That failure rate has gone done, largely due to higher quality drives and
> SSDs.
>

Those USB hard drives are interesting.  I've been using them for
low-access storage just because they're SOOO cheap per TB, especially
when you factor in not needing an HBA/etc, and the transfer rate of
USB3 is very good - it takes two drives per USB host to saturate it
and that is assuming 100% throughput.

They seem to be mostly rebranded enterprise drives - probably
surplus/etc.  Most I've gotten tend to be He-filled/etc.  Of course
the warranty is smaller and there are no guarantees of what you'll get
beyond the capacity.

The irony is that the manufacturers were sneaking SMR into the
RAID-grade 3.5mm format drives, but their really large USB drives were
CMR.  That is the opposite of what I would have expected.

This time I got the best deal on a 14TB Exos X16, but I think that is
probably due to the supply chain shortages, Chia, and the fact that I
wasn't willing to wait for the next Best Buy sale (assuming that is
ever a thing again with Chia).

-- 
Rich
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