[mythtv-users] OT: Predicted hard drive failure; replacement consideration

[jedi]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 07:06:55PM +0100, Mike Perkins wrote:
> On 20/04/12 15:46, jedi wrote:
> >On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 09:17:26PM +0800, James Linder wrote:
> >>
> >>On 20/04/2012, at 8:00 PM, mythtv-users-request at mythtv.org wrote:
> >>
> >>>>>I, too, have, sadly, had much bad luck with Seagates, from 500GB up to
> >>>>>2TB,
> >>>>>failing in much less than the expected life
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>I had a 100% failure rate for Seagate 750G drives. Two failed
> >>>>simultaneously and trashed my RAID. All replaced under warranty.
> >>>>--
> >>>>Ray Lischner
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>Yep I've had a 750GB Seagate drive replaced twice and a 500GB drive
> >>>replaced once but its replacement has yet to be used
> >>
> >>Seagate's "ATA more than just an interface" says that if you have more than 1 disc in a box it WILL fail and lo and behold over the years disc failure is almost legendry.
> >>The rational rebels against such nonsense but stories like the above persist (and their article explains WHY and distinguishes between enterprise, SCSI and consumer disks)
> >
> >     The only Seagate drives of mine that have actually failed were completely
> >unmonitored disks used for myth recordings. The rest I have taken out of service
> >pre-emptively based on values reported by smartctl.
> >
> This isn't one of those Hiesenberg things, is it? Could it be the
> disks all run merrily along *until* you run smartctl against them?

    No. I just let some drives run until they died because they didn't
hold anything important. I only started monitoring some of my disks 
because of Seagate's big problems about 3 years ago.

    I kept an eye on stuff I didn't want to lose. I was trying to stay
a step ahead of the spinny disk grim reaper.

    I have 2 drives from Seagate's notorious period currently on deathwatch.

    My newer Seagate drives appear to be fine despite being monitored.

> 
> FWIW, I have a big pile of dead Western Digital drives in the corner
> of the room, of various sizes and ages. Not a single one of any
> other make.

    I recently decided to gather stats for all of my systems.

    Old-ish Seagate drives all have errors. Newish ones don't. Neither do the WDs.