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.
We are going to go for Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 as they appear to offer the best value combination of price / performance.