On Sunday, December 13, 2015 at 4:55:39 PM UTC-5, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"whit3rd" wrote in message
...
On Sunday, December 13, 2015 at 6:29:17 AM UTC-8, rangerssuck wrote:

A few years back, I bought 100 seagate barracuda drives. They
started failing soon after installation, and at an alarming rate
...
Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi and Western Digital all told me that they
don't have such a product because their marketing people didn't
recognize a need for them, and "If it dies under warranty, we'll
ship you a refurb." Feh.

It could be worse. At least, their techs get the dead unit to
analyze, and its flaws
might inform the next generation hardware design.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/

-jsw

Oh yeah, that story reads very similar to mine, except that I am a one (sometimes two or three) man shop, and my customers (and their drives) are spread out over the NY metropolitan area. When one of these drives fails, and I have to go to the friggin' Empire State Building to replace it, the warranty coverage on a hundred dollar drive doesn't matter even a little bit.

I now only install systems in raidz3 configuration. That allows three drives to fail before data is lost, and I get alarms when the first drive fails. Further, I buy from multiple sources to help avoid having drives in a single unit from the same manufacturing run.

It aint perfect, it never will be, but it's as close as I can reasonably get.