[mythtv-users] Hard Drive reliability esp. RAID issues

[John Drescher]

> I am sure you will all have seen issues with RAID and dive failure;
> with the readership of this list. I have just seen this article
> covering the RAID5 issues and RAID6 lifespan.
>
> The highlights are:
>
> Today; RAID 5 with moderate amount of drives is likely to fail during
> a rebuild following a drive failure; this has been well publicised
> because of the error rate of drives.
>
I would say from experience that this is very unlikely that a second
drive will fail in the 8 hours it takes to rebuild a 6TB array. And
even if it did with linux software raid you could recover. With HW
raid you will probably need specialized software to force the array to
except drives that are marked bad.


>
> RAID 6 is the short term solution at the expense of read/write
> performance and second parity hard drive and the associated higher
> costs.
>

At a time I used raid6 (at work) because every raid5 should have a hot
spare online anyways but raid6 is slightly slower at writes (actually
faster at reads) and causes more wear on the extra drive than just
leaving it spindown.


John