Purchasing hard drives with non-sequential serial numbers
I've always heard that you should not purchase hard disks with sequential serial numbers for any storage system. Now I find myself, for the first time, in a position where I need to purchase around sixteen drives and there seems to be no way to buy this many hard disks and guarantee they weren't all from the same day of manufacturing.
How do I do this? Explain why I'm being overly paranoid.
Solution 1:
I'm going to disagree with joeqwerty here, because I had a similar issue. Check out my experience here, and see the accepted answer. 3/5 of my disks, all purchased in the same transaction, all failed within 24 hours of eachother.
Although I think my experiences were fairly extreme, the real problem happens later on in the life of the device, when all the drives the same age will start to fail in a similar timeframe, so your line of thinking is spot on, but might prove to be more difficult than you think to get around, unless you wait 6 months before buying a 2nd batch of drives.
I guess one solution is to buy disks from different manufacturers and mix them up, however I've had poor experience with this too, because my Western Digitals were 2Mb smaller than my Seagates. Not really an issue when you're building a new array (there will just be 2Mb of unused space on the larger disks), but is a HUGE problem when you've got a failed array and you're trying to rebuild it and you can't becuase all your spare disks are 2Mb too small.
The only thing I can suggest you do is perhaps buy 8 disks from one retailer and then buy another 8 from somewhere else. I doubt you'll be losing out on any volume discounts, and if it helps put your mind at ease then it's worth the extra effort.
Solution 2:
You are not paranoid, it's indeed very bad to use drives from the same batches, for a simple reason :
- Same drives, built the same way, from the same components, used the same way, are likely to fail at a same time.
I've been working for years at a data recovery company, and i've seen amounts of RAID array with several drives failing at the same time (within array rebuild time), usually all those with consecutive or very close serial numbers (I recall a sad customer who had a RAID of 5 drives, 3 of them having the magnetic substrate wiped out from the platter...)
I'm not sure if you are talking about a RAID system here, but if so, I advice against mixing drives from different makers, as you'll lose performance due to different seek times and data transfer rate, and as Farseeker stated, you're likely to have size issues with raid.
To splay the failure date of these drives, you should turn to different resellers, since it's unlikely they'll have the same batch of drive.
You can also "burn" those coming from the same batch : use heavily one drive alone one week, add another drive and use them both heavily another week, add a third drive and use them three heavily ... For 16 drives it is a bit inconvenient, so you should evaluate the risks of the drives failing in the same period to set the burning time.
Solution 3:
Presumably the thinking would be that if there was a glitch in the manufacturing process that affected one drive in a sequentially numbered series (drives from the same manufacturing batch) that all of the drives in that series\batch would be affected. IMHO, there are three reasons to discount this line of thinking:
Modern manufacturing processes are in fact, a science. While manufacturing errors do occur, it seems that the incidence of failure for any x number of units produced is a very small number and that post-manufacturing QA testing would render this number even smaller. The chances of getting some multiple number of units with the same defect seems unlikely to me.
If an anomoly existed in a single unit from a specific batch, that anomoly might slip through testing but I find it hard to believe that a larger number of units with the same inherent anomoly would slip through testing and make it into your hands.
If the issue was an engineering issue and not a manufacturing issue, chances are that all units in the same product family, from any and all manufacturing series\batches would be affected so it wouldn't really matter if they came from the same batch or not, they would all be faulty until the engineering problem was discovered, resolved, and the manufacturing process adjusted accordingly.
Of course, I'm neither a manufacturing nor an engineering expert, so these are just my thoughts on the matter.