What components make enterprise HDDs more reliable than consumer HDDs?

[0pTicaL]

Been googling around for info and haven't been able to pinpoint exactly what makes a enterprise drive more reliable than consumer drives.

I understand consumer demand for bigger drives at lower cost so manufacturers have to cut corners somewhere along the line. What/Where exactly are they cutting and by now much?

 

[Dude]

Interesting question. This link gives some good info

Hard drives are designed with a wide variety of features that can impact data integrity and
system uptime. Some hard drive manufactures may differentiate enterprise from desktop drives
by not testing certain enterprise-class features, validate the drives with different test criteria, or
disable enterprise-class features on a desktop class hard drives so they can market and price
them accordingly. Other manufacturers have different architectures and designs for the two
drive classes. It can be difficult to get detailed information and specifications on different drive
modes.

 

[LMiller7]

The current market for consumer hard drives is highly competitive. Manufacturers will do whatever it takes to keep costs down, as they must if they wish to stay in business. Price is always a major factor and in many cases the deciding one. Many computer user seem to think that hard drives never fail, as witnessed by the fact that they never make backups of even their most important files. I see this on computer forums almost every day. There are often 2 ways of doing things, the cheap way and the right way. Needless to say consumer drives will see a lot of the former.

The market for enterprise level drives is quite different. IT managers are well aware of the fact that reliability is far more important than price. This applies to all computer components, not just hard drives. They are well aware of the fact that hard drives do fail and are willing to pay a premium price to ensure this doesn't happen very often. The difference in the initial purchase cost can be quickly overwhelmed by even a short period of down time. Server drives usually run 24/7 and sometimes in areas not easily accessible to IT staff. It can be quite expensive to send someone to replace a drive, even when it does not cause a service disruption.

The details of how consumer and enterprise level drives are built are best known to the manufacturers. For reasons that should be obvious they are very reluctant to discuss this.

 

[Wrenches]

When I was looking for a HDD I did some research and read reviews. I decided on a Seagate Constellation 1tb HDD for my system. It has a good reputation as being reliable and I paid for it. I believe it's an enterprise drive.

I'm not worrying about data loss because I use my system for recreation and have nothing important stored in my system. I just don't like the drive to take a dump on me.

 

[Solarstarshines]

When I was looking for a HDD I did some research and read reviews. I decided on a Seagate Constellation 1tb HDD for my system. It has a good reputation as being reliable and I paid for it. I believe it's an enterprise drive.

I'm not worrying about data loss because I use my system for recreation and have nothing important stored in my system. I just don't like the drive to take a dump on me.

I think Barracuda is a better drive but that drive is Seagate I always trusted Seagate since 95

 

[0pTicaL]

Thanks for the info guys, guess this is a hardware secret we will never really know because I don't think review sites will open up hard drives as part of their reviews.

When I was looking for a HDD I did some research and read reviews. I decided on a Seagate Constellation 1tb HDD for my system. It has a good reputation as being reliable and I paid for it. I believe it's an enterprise drive.

I'm not worrying about data loss because I use my system for recreation and have nothing important stored in my system. I just don't like the drive to take a dump on me.

I think Barracuda is a better drive but that drive is Seagate I always trusted Seagate since 95

Barracuda is Seagate's line of desktop HDDs, Constellation is their enterprise class HDDs, so Barracuda < Constellation.

 

[DeaconFrost]

I would think one of the largest differences would be the warranty coverage, which I would expect to be longer on the Enterprise level.

The problem is, hard drive usage is so subjective. Several of you have said Seagate is your brand of choice, but what about someone who's had several die? Hard drive brand really doesn't matter, as long as you stick to a quality brand, and avoid any lines that had issues, like the DeathStars and the 7200.7 (I think). Keep your documentation, keep your drives cool, and keep your data backed up. There's little more you can do.

 

[Wrenches]

The reviews helped me pick out a drive by seeing how many had returned the drives for defects and at the time there was a batch of WDs found bad.

I'm not saying they're bad drives but it was a bad time to pick WDs at the moment. It has to be the flood thing.

 

[0pTicaL]

The reviews helped me pick out a drive by seeing how many had returned the drives for defects and at the time there was a batch of WDs found bad.

I'm not saying they're bad drives but it was a bad time to pick WDs at the moment. It has to be the flood thing.

I believe that's their Red line of drives. Their blues and blacks seem to be OK.

 

[bobafetthotmail]

More often than not it simply boils down to more stringent quality control parameters. And it's not a given that what "fails" this test isn't fit for desktop quality control and is sold as such.

The same as CPU "binning", or the reason you see CPUs of the same generation and class marketed at different clock frequencies, or why any GPU that is less than the flagship is theoretically the same but has some parts disabled.

It was simply tested and was found unstable beyond a certain clock, or some subsystems were wonky while the rest of the die was fine.

Why? Manufacturing process isn't 100% precise, usually by choice (raising reliability from 50% to 80% costs a fraction of what costs going from 90% to 99% or more, it's usually cheaper to have more % of quality assurance failures if you factor the increase in production output).

 

[DeaconFrost]

I believe that's their Red line of drives. Their blues and blacks seem to be OK.

See, here's what backs up my point. I'm using several RED drives, with no issues. They are fast and relatively cheap.

 

[0pTicaL]

I believe that's their Red line of drives. Their blues and blacks seem to be OK.

See, here's what backs up my point. I'm using several RED drives, with no issues. They are fast and relatively cheap.

It reinforces Google's HDD study. Like the report stated it also depends on "vintage". Same people can get the same brand and line of drives but made from a different year and yield completely different results.

 

[essenbe]

I believe it was Western Digital Green drives that were flawed from the start. In many cases, the different year means different firmware which was the problem with Seagates 7200.11 drives, I believe. The 7200.12 drives turned out to be quite good because the firmware was updated. I own a few and have had no problem with any of them.

 

[jeffshead]

I believe that's their Red line of drives. Their blues and blacks seem to be OK.

See, here's what backs up my point. I'm using several RED drives, with no issues. They are fast and relatively cheap.

It reinforces Google's HDD study. Like the report stated it also depends on "vintage". Same people can get the same brand and line of drives but made from a different year and yield completely different results.

I don't think brand matters much theses days as long as you stick to one of the top five. I've had to replace equal amounts of WD and Seagate.

As far as desktop vs. enterprise grade, it wouldn't surprise me if the only major differences are the plants they come out of and the warranty. Not saying that's so, just wouldn't be surprised. The warranty that comes with new, desktop HDD's stinks! When they used to come with a five year warranty, I never considered purchasing enterprise level HDD's for my personal use PC's. I think manufacturers finally realized this.

We all get caught up on speed but I believe the slower RPM desktop units that run cooler will be likely to last longer. Actually, some of the newer, lower RPM (5,900) units are on par with the higher end 7,200 RPM units.

 

[Solarstarshines]

I believe it was Western Digital Green drives that were flawed from the start. In many cases, the different year means different firmware which was the problem with Seagates 7200.11 drives, I believe. The 7200.12 drives turned out to be quite good because the firmware was updated. I own a few and have had no problem with any of them.

It's the Green and Eco drives like Steve said the Caviar Blue and Black are there top sellers because they are reliable

I have a WD My book 500GB from like 2007 damn thing acts like it did the day we turned it on so no issues there

For me I just more familiar with Seagate as I used them longer nothing wrong with WD even Maxtor Toshiba drives it all boils down to what you feel works best for you

You wouldn't buy a Ford if you were a Chevy man would you ? pretty much same thing in a sense but most general people will go with the best bang for the buck not what performs better because performance cost money and not only you but everyone else think same thing less speed but save some money

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I believe it was Western Digital Green drives that were flawed from the start. In many cases, the different year means different firmware which was the problem with Seagates 7200.11 drives, I believe. The 7200.12 drives turned out to be quite good because the firmware was updated. I own a few and have had no problem with any of them.

It was the Seagate 7200.11s. I got burned by two of them (one died after a year; the other one had bad sectors when I received it and the vendor weaseled out of replacing it). What really left the bad taste in my mouth was the way Seagate tried to keep the problem quiet and wouldn't even acknowledge that there was a problem with the run for quite some time.

Some of the earlier WD Greens had problems with the heads repeatedly parking themselves when idle, creating a faint clicking noise, wearing themselves out prematurely. I use 2TB Greens to back up the WD Blacks in my machine. One of the drives sounds like it may be a clicker but, since it doesn't get plugged into my computer except for during a backup, it sees very little idle time so I'm not worried about it since I do have a spare (I have a total of seven, one being an accidental spare). If it does die (which probably will be well out of warranty since it gets plugged in for less than hour only once a week), I do have that spare to replace it with. I'm not worried about losing data since I make two backups, one right after the other, when doing my weekly backups. I also have a third back up that resides in a safe deposit box at my credit union that gets renewed no less than once a month (actually, I swap drives to keep them in rotation and to avoid an extra trip to the credit union each time). In addition to that, I use Carbonite for a continuous back up to the cloud.

Another reason for the bad rap the Greens have been getting is they were getting used for combined boot and data drives (the head parking when idle feature, among other things, caused a lot of "interesting" problems with the OS) and in NAS systems (again, the head parking when idle feature frequently caused grief with the RAIDs). The REDS were developed to provide "green" advantages (lower power usage and less expensive) and still be compatible with a RAIDed NAS.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

...As far as desktop vs. enterprise grade, it wouldn't surprise me if the only major differences are the plants they come out of and the warranty. Not saying that's so, just wouldn't be surprised...

I checked the 2TB enterprise WDs on NewEgg and they have the same warranty—five years—that the WD Blacks have. I was too lazy to check any of the others out. Considering how anally I back up my data, I don't feel it's worth the extra expense to get a WD enterprise over a Black since I gain no warranty advantage.

 

[0pTicaL]

I think I shouldn't have to worry too much since I'm building a RAID10 array with the Lian Li EX-503 I ordered last week.

The only thing I don't really understand is what happens to the 5th drive in a RAID10 array.