[mythtv-users] An LVM'd drive died! What do I do...

[chris at cpr.homelinux.net]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2005 at 10:35:39AM -0700, Blammo wrote:
> So, my advice, in the short? Buy good hardware, set it up in ways
> known to be stable, and it will serve you well. You get what you pay
> for.

On a related note - watch the drive temperatures!  Before I upgraded to 
RAID5 I had three hard drives connected as master, master and slave.  
Since RAID5 doesn't like slave drives I bought an extra IDE controller, 
and while I was at the store I saw a shiny new toy - a removable hard 
drive rack with a 4" cooling fan and room for 3 drives.  I installed it 
all and everything was fine for a while.  Then I started getting RAID 
failures and kernel panics, and everything seemed to point to the new 
IDE controller since it was always /dev/hde that failed, and after a 
reboot it would rebuild OK and SMART would say there was nothing wrong 
with the drives.  The failures always happened when I was playing one 
recording while watching and commercial flagging others, so I thought 
maybe it was a congestion issue, particularly since the ide controller 
for hde showed a lot more interrupts than the others.  Eventually it 
dawned on me that a bus or driver failure should happen very quickly 
under load, whereas my system would go crazy about 15-30 minutes into 
the show.  I checked the drives and eventually noticed that hde was 
running hot.  The special new rack was actually causing the drives to 
run hotter than usual because although there was a fan, the drives were 
physically closer to each other than in the original case mounts.  I 
pulled hde out of the rack and put it in the lower case mount (no fan, 
but lots of room) and re-mounted the other two drives in the cooling 
rack with extra room between them.  Now the drive temperture on hde is 
still higher than I'd like, but it's completely stable no matter how 
hard the machine is working and I haven't had any problems since.