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

[sonofzev at iinet.net.au]

On Fri May  8 10:17 , Bill Williamson  sent:

>On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 10:13 AM, Dale Pontius <DEPontius at edgehp.net> wrote:
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>Anthony Giggins wrote:
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>
>How about this for a Seagate Horror story,
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>
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>I bought a 750GB ST3750330AS it lasted 8 months and then failed without
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>warning loosing all the data including several GB of the wifes data. --WAF
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>
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>Drive was replaced with a refurbished drive which lasted a further 7
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>months and started failing with bad sectors but I was able to backup all
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>the data before sending it back.
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>
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>That drive was replaced with another refurbished drive, I started copying
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>a few GB of data back onto the replaced drive to find Bad sectors in the
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>first day of use, spoke to a Seagate tech who said this is in spec and to
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>scan with the Seatools for DOS util which found errors and "repaired" them
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>but as soon as I booted back into Windows the bad block errors returned,
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>I'm now backing everything up on this drive constantly waiting for the
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>immanent failure, I haven't had time to chase this up with Seagate or do
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>any further testing but I think that will be my last purchase of a seagate
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>drive.
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>
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>On the upside I guess, the warranty is renewed on each replacement drive.
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>At this rate the drive will be in warranty for atleast the next decade.
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>
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>Cheers,
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>
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>Anthony
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>
>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.
>
>
>
>Raid 1/raid 5/raid 6 are about uptime.  NOT about replacing a backup.  What will
you do if there's a power supply surge, and your different brand different tiem
drives both go?
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>If your goal is 24/7 availability then RAID is a good idea.
>
>
>If your goal is surviving a disk outage or other problem then it's not.  It's
not a bad idea, it just won't help anything. 
>

This is very true.. But in the wife and girlfriend scenario 24/7 uptime is also
important... My myth box due to upgrades has had X not working on 3 occasions in
the last 18 months.. and apparently it's "always breaking"... 

RAID is also a safety, I've had a drive fail and thankfully it was part of a RAID
5 setup.... so no data was lost or was needed to be recovered.. If you have good
PSU's and also good power protection the chances of a power surge making it to
your drives is much lower than  a drive failing, so RAID is always worth
considering even if it is just going to save you the pain of re-imaging or
rebuilding your OS or rebuilding your data from backups... 

Actually that was only one of 2 drive failures in my time of owning PC 's (since
1990 when I got a second hand AT computer with Turbo button and all).... one
failure was an 8 year old drive that had been thoroughly thrashed.. the drive
above was a 200GB drive that was in the mezannine level of a warehouse with
ambient temps exceeding 40 degrees.. so the drives were very hot.... I think it's
luck of the draw..although I have noticed the WD drives do seem to run 5 degrees
or more cooler than Seagate drives. my 3 * 750GB WD's have been running for over
a year and a half 24/7.. and smartmon is showing them still to be very healthy..
of course critical data is backed up offline.