I just hope...
WD's hard disk quality doesn't suffer for this.
*cough* deathstar *cough*
One year after Western Digital announced it was going to acquire Hitachi GST the deal is done, but only after conditions imposed by three different regulatory agencies have been met. Western Digital (WD) has bought Viviti Technologies, formerly Hitachi GST, for $3.9bn in cash and 25 million WD shares worth $0.9 billion; a …
Everyone has their hard disk horror stories. I know different admins who will all swear against a different brand of hard disk - "Don't buy IBM/HGST/Samsung/Seagate/WD/Maxtor", delete as appropriate.
You should expect an annual failure rate of about 7% on consumer grade drives, so if you have 100 servers with 4 drives in each, you're going to be replacing a bunch of disks each year.
"I just hope...WD's hard disk quality doesn't suffer for this."
Ha! What quality would that be? We've had more WD drives less than 2 years old fail in the last year than all the rest combined where I work. When a laptop drive is acting up, I can pretty much predict that 4 out of 5 times it will be a WD 'Scorpio' these days when I pull it.
Completely agree with "Unicornpiss" - when we see signs of a failing drive at work, we usually guess WD. When we see a WD drive in a misbehaving computer, we test it (and it's usually the cause). One of the shop owners always tells us off for diagnosing by brand, but 99% of the time it's right.
That said, every brand has it's bad days. How many people swore they'd never trust Seagate after the 1TB firmware issue? And of course there's the Deathstar thing... And then there was Maxtor (who I'm pretty sure Seagate only bought to save us all from the data carnage).
14.5k in RAID I assume. So not only is your experience based on a very small qty (statistically speaking of course) but they are also only one type of HDD. The world wide market PER QUARTER is circa 170MILLION drives.
If you are getting a 7% failure rate I suggest you speak with the supplier pronto, because like I said before, that isnt the norm.
Are you mishandling your drives? Running too hot? Do you have the incorrect type of drive for your RAID enclosures?