Question:
I'm in the market for a large SCSI drive, and I could not
help but notice that Fujitsu's devices, while hardly cheap relative
to the competition, appear to be possessed of an almost supernal degree
of reliability - warranteed for five years, and with listed MTBFs upward
of two hundred thousand hours (!).
This seems out of kilter just in a qualitative sense. No other
manufacturer of which I'm aware has such a long warranty, nor do they
make such astonishing claims about drive longevity. Seriously, those
types of MTBF figures cannot be anything more than just estimates, can
they? Reasonable doubt and Occam's Razor would tend to deny that the
Fujitsu engineers have actually run these drives for more than twenty
years in the course of amassing their failure rate statistics .
Some feedback would be of immense value here. Are Fujitsu's
drives anywhere nearly as good as they are claimed to be?
Answer:
Well, their 5.25" and 3.5" SCSI drives probably don't have enough
flight-time for anyone to answer this from field evidence, but I can
talk about the older Fujitsu drives. A public-access Unix system in
town that I'm involved with (Grex, +1 313 761-3000) runs on a
Sun-2/170 with two Fujitsu Eagle hard drives. These are 10"
form-factor, 400MB SMD drives. They were probably manufactured around
1985 or 1986. They still work fine, but we're looking to replace them
simply because of the power drain -- they consume around 470W,
continuously.
Before we had the Eagles on-line, we were using smaller Fujitsu M2312
and M2322 drives (80MB and 140MB, respectively, both 8" SMD). They
were probably made around 1983 or 1984. They also worked flawlessly,
although the M2322 required a literal hurricane of airflow around it
to keep the temperature down and the drive mechanism operating
properly. (The Sun-3 floorstanding enclosure made for this drive
works well, with 4" muffin fans at either end of the drive.)
From the track record of the 10" and 8" Fujitsu SMD drives, I would
say that a 5-year warranty is not out of line, although a 200,000 MTBF
might be -- that's over 22 years, and I'm not even sure that the
M2312s are going to last that long.
