[mythtv-users] Hard Drives that Actually Work?
Terrence Martin
tmartin at physics.ucsd.edu
Wed Dec 15 00:12:22 UTC 2004
I have more experience with disks as a result of the 300 or so I have in
my clusters, rather than MythTV. I have seen many disks fail, but things
seem to be improving. Most disks I find, if they are going to fail, fail
in their first year. So multi year warranty is a must.
Any manufacturer can be bad, but disk from 2002 to early 2004 were
probably the worst from many mfg. This is the period when the disk mfg
reduced warranties for retail drives to 1 year.
Things seem to have improved. Seagate recently increased their warranty
to up to 5 years on SATA drives. Some of the other mfg have followed suit.
My experience is that I have moved away from Maxtor and WD to seagate.
Overall I am so far finding Seagate disks to be more reliable. I based
this on experience, and the fact that seagate provides some of the best
warranties out there. Warranties are a gamble on the par tof the mfg so
they seem to be confident in their products. I also only use SATA which
I have also found to be of superior reliabilty, although I have only
deployed a dozen or so SATA disk.
My comment is you never know. Disks fail for a variety of reasons, and
it is best to assume you will have a failure at some point.
To mitigate the risk I recommend either RAID1 or RAID5 software
mirroring if you actually care about your data otherwise go with the
disks with the best warranties. They may not last longer, but at least
you can get them replaced. Also go with SATA if you can. SATA has some
nice features that (if you have the right controller) can reduce some of
the load situations that increase the wear and tear on your disk.
Terrence
Brian May wrote:
>>>>>>"Paul" == <Paul.Buchanan at thomson.com> writes:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>
> Paul> I just had my second Western Digital Special Edition 200 GB
> Paul> drive die on me. Since I'm using an ASUS Pundit, I figured
> Paul> heat was the culprit, so the second drive had a dual-fan
> Paul> cooler on it. No such luck. After about three months of
> Paul> use, performance suddenly degrades, and the journals begin
> Paul> to corrupt. A few days later, I/O errors crop up, and the
> Paul> drive is pretty much useless. Are these drives just not up
> Paul> to the stress of a PVR? I'm interested in hearing what kind
> Paul> of drives people have had good luck with, as I've about had
> Paul> it with these. I'll get my third on warranty, but It won't
> Paul> be going back into a myth box.
>
>In the past I have had lots of problems with hard disks on my 24x7
>Linux server. Hard disks (from all major brands) were dieing between 3
>months and 13 months (one month after warranty).
>
>I ended up paying more for 4 hard disks (WD) with 3 year warranty. The
>hard disks in my Linux server are still working perfectly - I am a bit
>suspicious of the hard disks in my mythtv system (once I tried to boot
>up and one hard disk didn't come online - I took the computer apart,
>pulled the IDE connector out, and put everything back together and it
>suddenly started working again... However, I sometimes get bad looking
>hard disk error messages on boot up when I look...)
>
>
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