SATA hard drives for our coraid ATAoE SAN

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.

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