Is anyone using Western Digital "AV" drives?

[rowan]

"Standard" greenpower (desktop) : http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=336

AV greenpower (embedded) : http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=388

Then there's Blue (desktop) and Black (desktop) product lines. These drives all look identical (and have the same weight), I wouldn't be surprised if they have the same mechanicals and circuit boards with the only difference being some firmware tweaks and different warranty levels...

My supplier has these models with only a few bucks difference in price between GP and AV, has anyone used them? Just wondering whether they'd be better in a server, or whether it's just a pretty badge for a few extra lines of code to make the drive run a bit slower to reduce noise.

[rowan]

Further investigation suggests the AV models trade off rotation speed and seek time in order to reduce noise. Probably not a good choice for a desktop or server, unless you wanted to be super quiet. (My office has 25 hard drives in 6 machines spinning 24/7 so I wouldn't mind an occasional break!)

[BV]

Today at Best Buy i just picked up a Western Digital External with 2 X 1TB Drives in it Raid 1 Mirror.
I can't believe how quiet it is. I bet it has those drives it it. They are SATA hot swap drives.

[rowan]

If they're hot swap then have a peek behind the cover, you should be able to see a small sticker with the serial number at the front without having to pull out the drive. Then plug the serial into http://websupport.wdc.com/warranty/serialinput.asp and it should return the model number.

(I have no idea if you're really this curious or can be bothered doing this. )

[rowan]

bump for comments

[munki]

Maxtor 1 TBs are all I've been running for months now... ship a couple in, and a couple out every month... no problems.

Nice and quick, decent cache sizes... works well in my raid 1 and 0 setups.

[sandman!]

why would you buy WD drives ?

anything that sacrifices performance for power or sound should be stayed away from

[rowan]

Originally Posted by sandman!

why would you buy WD drives ?

Because I've had a very bad experience with Seagate. Out of a purchase of 4 drives over the next 18-24 months I ended up with a total of 6 new drives (2 duds were replaced by the retailer), 6 recos (replaced by Seagate), and 7 failures. That's just from buying FOUR drives at a shop.

Originally Posted by sandman!

anything that sacrifices performance for power or sound should be stayed away from

Depends on your application. I was curious about these drives because their info says they're suitable for 24/7 situation. In my case, sacrificing seek times is not an acceptable compromise.

[rowan]

^ In addition in more recent weeks 2 Seagate drives failed in a newly delivered server, and in another one at another host another Seagate failed during install. Neither had been put under any load. When it comes to the "S" word I am totally jinxed.

[Socks]

I've been buying Seagates for a few years now, they've been reliable.. Question for you Rowan:

Last seagate I have in my machine I SWEAR is muccch slower than the rest.. I can't for the life of me figure out why, it's brand new, and I've copied, deleted, moved, downloaded, extracted hundreds of times to it, never an error message or crc problem.. Even defragged it with Raxco.. But I'm telling you, the thing is a fucking tortoise even doing basic shit.

Any ideas?

[Socks]

Originally Posted by rowan

Depends on your application. I was curious about these drives because their info says they're suitable for 24/7 situation. In my case, sacrificing seek times is not an acceptable compromise.

But if they're better at actually working hard 24/7, isn't that a great tradeoff? Even 3-4 hours of interruption/downtime would be an assload of the difference in seek times over the course of a few months I'd think? Maybe you have cold swap drives so it's not an issue to replace drives, but I'm sure building the raid, fsck all that shit (I have no idea wtf I'm talking about now) takes time too.

[rowan]

Originally Posted by Socks

I've been buying Seagates for a few years now, they've been reliable.. Question for you Rowan:

Last seagate I have in my machine I SWEAR is muccch slower than the rest.. I can't for the life of me figure out why, it's brand new, and I've copied, deleted, moved, downloaded, extracted hundreds of times to it, never an error message or crc problem.. Even defragged it with Raxco.. But I'm telling you, the thing is a fucking tortoise even doing basic shit.

Any ideas?

Did you remove the jumper at the rear that forces it into SATA150 mode? I don't think SATA150/SATA v1 supports AHCI, NCQ etc. I had a new server set to IDE/compatibility mode and on boot it was reported as SATA150 with read/write speeds not much faster than 20Mbytes/sec; once I changed that to native AHCI it was identified as SATA300 and speeds went to past 50Mbytes/sec.

I still remain cynical about the difference between desktop and so-called enterprise drives, I think a lot of it is in the marketing. The only obvious enterprise drive that WD manufactures is the VelociRaptor, which has a remarkably different form to all of their 3.5" drives. I have one and it's working hard, the seeking sounds like crackling electricity.

[Socks]

Originally Posted by rowan

Did you remove the jumper at the rear that forces it into SATA150 mode? I don't think SATA150/SATA v1 supports AHCI, NCQ etc. I had a new server set to IDE/compatibility mode and on boot it was reported as SATA150 with read/write speeds not much faster than 20Mbytes/sec; once I changed that to native AHCI it was identified as SATA300 and speeds went to past 50Mbytes/sec.

I still remain cynical about the difference between desktop and so-called enterprise drives, I think a lot of it is in the marketing. The only obvious enterprise drive that WD manufactures is the VelociRaptor, which has a remarkably different form to all of their 3.5" drives. I have one and it's working hard, the seeking sounds like crackling electricity.

Neat thanks for the advice, I think I'm gonna *gasp* power off and see if this is the case.

I use an old 36gb raptor as my main OS drive still, can't bring myself to get one of those velociraptors yet.. Plus I doubt they help much on anything but a server or a busy file system.

[Gaybucks]

I've used pretty much every brand of drive out there over the years, and my theory is that all the drive manufacturers get together once a year and decide who's going to have a run of crap drives that year.

I've had a ton of failures with Western Digital and Maxtor and the old IBMs (before they became Hitachi). On the contrary, so far, I've had only one failure out of all the Seagates I've used. But I think it's luck of the draw to a large extent.

I finally decided that a company willing to put a 5 year warranty on its drives must have some reason to believe that it's drives are reliable, and a company (in this case, Western Digital) that only puts a one-year warranty on their drives must realize they are crap. (In fairness, WD has now reinstated 3 year warranties.)

The only drives that I've *never* had a failure with, ever, are Samsung drives, but they aren't easy to find, and they are generally not the highest capacity drives available either.

[sandman!]

Originally Posted by rowan

Because I've had a very bad experience with Seagate. Out of a purchase of 4 drives over the next 18-24 months I ended up with a total of 6 new drives (2 duds were replaced by the retailer), 6 recos (replaced by Seagate), and 7 failures. That's just from buying FOUR drives at a shop.



Depends on your application. I was curious about these drives because their info says they're suitable for 24/7 situation. In my case, sacrificing seek times is not an acceptable compromise.

when it comes to your drive failure something in your environment is helping the drives die or your wholesaler is dropping the drives 50 times before they leave there.

out of the 100+ drives i have running all over the place i have had 2 failures in the last 12 months.

[rowan]

Originally Posted by Gaybucks

I finally decided that a company willing to put a 5 year warranty on its drives must have some reason to believe that it's drives are reliable, and a company (in this case, Western Digital) that only puts a one-year warranty on their drives must realize they are crap. (In fairness, WD has now reinstated 3 year warranties.)

The only drives that I've *never* had a failure with, ever, are Samsung drives, but they aren't easy to find, and they are generally not the highest capacity drives available either.

Samsung offer 1TB drives now. If you go back a few years you'll find even they had a bad run for a while.

The main problem I see with drive warranties - Seagate and WD anyway - is that they replace your failed drive with a reconditioned model. This may be a frankenstein of used parts that test to acceptable tolerances, or it may even just be a drive that is "re" factory formatted to quietly map out all of the bad areas and reset all SMART values to default. I've had about as much luck with Seagate reco's as I've had with their new drives. One of the recos that Seagate sent me failed almost immediately - it had a high level of audible and tactile vibration, started click clacking from the moment it was switched on, and reported a SMART event within less than an hour. Crap.

[rowan]

I also found a document that says Samsung calculate their MTBF by testing a batch of drives for 72 hours. LOL!