Hard drive questions

[my87csx481]

I have a few questions for you guys...because one of three hard drives that I purchased just over 3 years ago is failing. I'm worried about the other two now. They're all out of warranty.

What value do you set for "Tasks checkpoint to disk at most every XX seconds" in BOINC -> advanced -> preferences -> disk and memory usage? What I'm getting at is: Does this setting have a lot to do with drive longevity? And if so, what should I set it to in order to ensure a longer drive lifespan?

What brands do you recommend for sata hard drives (not SSD....yet) for crunching, and otherwise? (My crunchers, all 2 of 'em, serve other purposes besides strictly crunching)

Should I even bother with "enterprise class" drives? (twice the $$$ for less than twice the warranty)

Thanks for any suggestions.

[Movieman]

I have a few questions for you guys...because one of three hard drives that I purchased just over 3 years ago is failing. I'm worried about the other two now. They're all out of warranty.

What value do you set for "Tasks checkpoint to disk at most every XX seconds" in BOINC -> advanced -> preferences -> disk and memory usage? What I'm getting at is: Does this setting have a lot to do with drive longevity? And if so, what should I set it to in order to ensure a longer drive lifespan?

What brands do you recommend for sata hard drives (not SSD....yet) for crunching, and otherwise? (My crunchers, all 2 of 'em, serve other purposes besides strictly crunching)

Should I even bother with "enterprise class" drives? (twice the $$$ for less than twice the warranty)

Thanks for any suggestions.

I love the old 36 gig raptors for crunching.
I have 2 that I bought back in August 2005 that still work fine.
I've bought 6 more of them used from people upgrading.
Grabbed a pair of them for $55.00 a month ago..
5 year warranty also.

[PoppaGeek]

For my crunchers I have a complicated formula to determine the best drive. It is based on years of experience and has not failed me yet. I call it BCWD. Buy cheapest Western Digital i Find usually on Newegg but sometime Amazon had a good deal.

[Someguy1982]

I always get western digital, it seems every time I try a new brand it ends up failing. I cant speak from experience about the enterprise drives, sorry.

[D_A]

Don't use a SSD for crunching. The frequent writes will shorten the lifespan for no appreciable performance (crunching that is) increase. If you want one, use it for your OS drive and have a regular drive for your crunching data (and swap partition).
Other than that, most of my drives ARE Seagate, but WILL BE Western Digital as they get replaced. I also recommend WD drive to people I like (or Hitachi if they piss me off enough).
I have no experience of "Enterprise" drives as yet, either.

[PoppaGeek]

The big Oracle/Solaris servers I managed all had storage arrays. The cabinet type. Hundreds of drives all SCSI Seagates, good drives, back then. Have probably a dozen or so around here, 2gig to 6gig. For desktop I like WD.

[fallwind]

Write to disk at most every: 300 seconds is what mine is set at. If the machine is on 24/7 and rarely rebooted, you can probably set it to 999 seconds and save a little disk activity. I have a mixed bag of brands in the farm: Hitachi, WD, Seagate. I bought a bunch of 40GB SATA Hitachis on ebay for next to nothing. The rest were just whatever was on sale when I placed an order.

[Otis11]

The only thing I know - I've NEVER lost a WD hard drive.

Retired my first machine from 6 months ago. Ran from 2001 till 2009 24/7 (F@H then WCG). Lost PSUs, Graphics cards(b/c the PSU), RAM... Almost all the stock stuff over 8 years... But that original WD hard drive is still in it. The reason it retired - Mobo gave out...

I've done that with 2 more computers since. As long as this record holds, I'm staying with it.

Just my

[=[PULSAR]=]

I love the old 36 gig raptors for crunching.
I have 2 that I bought back in August 2005 that still work fine.
I've bought 6 more of them used from people upgrading.
Grabbed a pair of them for $55.00 a month ago..
5 year warranty also.

+1 for the old 36gig raptor have a few and their still spinnin

[Kingcarcas]

WD +1, Seagate was ok too until recently i saw a bunch of bad reviews at the egg as well as negative stories around here.

[josh1980]

I'm in the process of setting up a few computers with no hard drives at all. I have a RAID-5 on my file server that will provide booting and operation for at least 3 crunchers and my HTPC. If it works well I might switch more computers. Since I have gigabit throughout my house the boot times shouldn't be too bad and I'll always have the RAID5 redundancy for a failed hard drive. This setup will also allow me to backup my drive images easily so that if I need to recover it is easy.

Check out http://www.ccboot.com/ for the tools I will be using.

Overall it might be more time effective to just buy a bunch of 40GB hard drives for cheap, but I'm doing this for the knowledge and experience of how this operates.

[jcool]

I've recently set my global preference to "write to disk at most every 600 seconds" (default is 60s) due to frequently dying Jmicro SSDs I am using for a few dedicated crunchers (can't use those ty drives anywhere else really).

@josh1980:

Awesome, this is exactly what I was looking for. If I get around to it, I will certainly be setting up something similar in the near future.
Let us know how it goes ok? Maybe open a dedicated thread, how to set up a diskless farm

[my87csx481]

Don't use a SSD for crunching. The frequent writes will shorten the lifespan for no appreciable performance (crunching that is) increase. If you want one, use it for your OS drive and have a regular drive for your crunching data (and swap partition).
Other than that, most of my drives ARE Seagate, but WILL BE Western Digital as they get replaced. I also recommend WD drive to people I like (or Hitachi if they piss me off enough).
I have no experience of "Enterprise" drives as yet, either.

So stay away from Hitachi?

Thanks for the suggestions. Interestingly, the failing drive is a Western Digital.

The other 2 I bought at the same time still pass S.M.A.R.T. ok.

[naokaji]

I have boinc on two ancient 500GB WDs running in raid 0, they have survived around 2 years of almost 24/7 crunching plus being used for storage just fine.
But then I also had a first gen raptor die on me, its all down to luck, but in general WDs tend to be reliable (besides its no problem to get a replacement for them should they fail within the warranty).
As for Hitachi, let me put it this way, they are also called deathstar for a reason.