We are looking to purchase some drives for a Coraid SR1521 storage appliance. Coraid maintain a list of compatible drives on their site, so it would be wise for us to stick to drives that have been tested without problems.
Hard drives comparison
- All disks shown are 1TB SATA drives.
- MTBF is the Mean Time Between Failures
- AFR is the Annualised Failure Rate. This is the % of the population of these drives that are likely to fail in an average year. I've calculated this myself based on 24/7 usage (e.g 8760 / MTBF * 100).
| Manufacturer | Model | Type | Part Number | MTBF | AFR | Price (inc VAT) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seagate | Barracuda ES.2 | Enterprise | ST31000340NS | 1,200,000 | 0.73% | £165.59 |
| Seagate | Barracuda 7200.11 | Desktop | ST31000340AS | 750,000 | 1.17% | £99.99 |
| Samsung | Spinpoint F1 * | Desktop | HD103UJ | 600,000 | 1.46% | £89.85 |
Notes * The Samung Spinpoint F1 has not been tested on a Coraid device yet.
Tom's hardware have a comparison of SATA disk transfer rates.
X-bit labs have an in-depth comparison on 1TB disks.
Samsung make an interesting point in their spintpoint F1 announcement pdf. Although buying a 1TB drive may cost more per Gigabyte than 2 x 500GB drives, the 2 drive solution is twice as likely to fail per Gigabyte. However, it will generally be slower as you have less spindles.