[mythtv-users] OT: 3 week old HDD "Clicking" ??

[Dale Pontius]

Anthony Giggins wrote:
> How about this for a Seagate Horror story,
> 
> I bought a 750GB ST3750330AS it lasted 8 months and then failed without
> warning loosing all the data including several GB of the wifes data. --WAF
> 
> Drive was replaced with a refurbished drive which lasted a further 7
> months and started failing with bad sectors but I was able to backup all
> the data before sending it back.
> 
> That drive was replaced with another refurbished drive, I started copying
> a few GB of data back onto the replaced drive to find Bad sectors in the
> first day of use, spoke to a Seagate tech who said this is in spec and to
> scan with the Seatools for DOS util which found errors and "repaired" them
> but as soon as I booted back into Windows the bad block errors returned,
> I'm now backing everything up on this drive constantly waiting for the
> immanent failure, I haven't had time to chase this up with Seagate or do
> any further testing but I think that will be my last purchase of a seagate
> drive.
> 
> On the upside I guess, the warranty is renewed on each replacement drive.
> At this rate the drive will be in warranty for atleast the next decade.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Anthony

OK, that tears it.  Right now my main Myth machine has Maxtor 160G and 
200G drives, with OS and data spread across both.  My wish has been that 
someday I'd get a pair of terabyte drives and put them in a RAID-1, but 
every now and then I've thought that TV really isn't that important, 
neither is OS install.  My /home directories are NFS mounted, and on the 
server they're on a RAID-1 pair, with a backup server and a backup 
RAID-1 pair.

But listening to this, I'm starting to think that RAID-1 is a good idea. 
  Better yet, make sure that the 2 drives are not just different brands, 
but different heritage brands.  (Do any drive makers now simply re-badge 
drives from another brand?)  That way I avoid any bad batch problems, 
since 2 drives bought at the same time may very well have similar 
manufacturing dates.  It's bad enough that stuffing drives into a RAID 
set gives them identical histories, at least getting different makers 
eases that.

Dale