I don't care. Stop wasting your money on making them.
Where's my 1Tb SSD?
Seagate has introduced its own disk for filer-focussed network-attached storage (NAS) boxes, a year after rival Western Digital launched its own Red NAS drive. The new Seagate spinner comes with NASworks software; it's clearly a startling coincidence that the WD Red's bundled software is called NASware. The Red is a 1TB, 2TB …
Then CacheCade is your friend... just upgraded the 600Gb drives on our main sql server installation with some 3Tb enterprise drives for space reasons, and was really worried about the performance hit, but adding a 400Gb (Intel) SSD as cache has done a more than admirable job of keeping performance up. And the installation was a POP. Would't trust a OCZ Vertex to that job, mind...
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Perhaps Seagate realised that by intentionally nobbling their basic consumer drives, removing Error Recovery Control from the firmware, instead of forcing people to buy more expensive "enterprise" drives they were actually driving customers into the arms of other manufacturers.
I have not seen any analysis where "enterprise" drives have any lower real-world failure rate than "consumer" drives.
Those building petabytes of storage typically use consumer drives. The WD Red hits a sweet spot which is almost as cheap as the cheapest consumer drive, but which hasn't been disabled from being used in RAID applications.
That would be because the data to do the comparison is behind NDAs, or needs somebody to go buy a few thousand drives.
That said, there's a pretty simple way to estimate: Compare the warranty periods and prices, then ask yourself which one the drive manufacturer must think has the highest failure rate within the first 1-3 years.
Assuming they want to make a profit, anyway!
Paranoia? Perhaps I was reading a different article. the one I read was illustrating that Seagate (a major disk drive manufacturer) has released a NAS optimized hard drive with largely the same specs as a product made by WD (aka Western Digital, another major hard drive manufacturer). then it contained a mention that WD may soon need to release new drives to compete with the larger sizes of Seagate's product. I'm not certain on this, but it seems to me that comparing the specs of two similar products hardly qualifies as paranoia (a thought process heavily influenced by fear or anxiety).