Originally posted by: rugby
I've ordered 3 dozen of various 7200.11 (mostly 500GB and 1TB drives) and have seen a failure rate of near 60% in the past 6 months. Drives were purchased from different vendors and even used in different machines (some in raid enclosures). I've never seen this type of failure before from a manufacturer. I no longer buy Seagate drives because of this, I've switched over to Hitachi for our main raid arrays and haven't had a single problem.
I had to explain to a client that 4 drives failed in their raid 6 array and we had to restore from backup nearly 3 TB of data which is NOT fast.
I saw something related to this problem today........
<a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://www.dailytech.com/Report+Kingston+to+Sell+Intel+SSDs/article13120.htm">I used to work for Maxtor, and right now for SanDisk. So I think I can tell you how the qualification of HD and SSD usually work:
For OEM like DELL and HP, they have a spec on write pattern, temperature, sample size, and all sorts of stuff. Basically they ask you to ship them 1000-5000 evaluation samples for a new design (when you change heads/platters/coating/chips/controllers/etc), and they randomly pick 1000 out of the 5000, and run the torture test. It has to fail less than 0.5% of the sample size, or else they reject your design.
What happens when you are rejected? Your 10 million drives per month order is now divided among your 3 other competitors and your stock drop 30-80%.
http://Seagate is in trouble right now because they have design problem in 7200.11, Maxtor and IBM went into similar problems and never recover completely from it.</"> Samsung is now pretty much the only game in SSD because they pass all the spec, one of our competitor (can't say who) got dropped because their memory failed. They then decided to buy Samsung's memory and passed the spec, but still fail some other test later and was dropped by DELL.
What happens to those drives/designs that failed? Bestbuy and Circuit City, they are still good enough for most users, but for a large OEM, a 0.5% extra failure rate means losing millions on profit. Retail customers will be happy if you send them a new drive with a size upgrade, or refund their purchase. </a>
I thought it was pretty interesting....