[mythtv-users] An LVM'd drive died! What do I do...

[Steve Adeff]

On Thursday 27 October 2005 20:27, chris at cpr.homelinux.net wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 11:30:07AM -0400, Steve Adeff wrote:
> > noone has yet mentioned S.M.A.R.T. yet. After I went through a stint of
> > loosing 2 hd's in a week's time (due to powersupply problems) I looked
> > into things and found smartctl, which monitors the smart status of drives
> > and can even be setup to email you when it encounters a problem.
> > According to manufacturers warranty's upon a SMART pre-fail warning you
> > are allowed to, if the drive is still under warranty, get a replacement.
>
> IMHO, SMART is like the sound from a rifle - if you're in
> front of the bullet you'll never hear it.  I've had three
> SMART-enabled drives fail on me.  In every case, the email
> saying "a drive is dying" was just about the last thing
> written to the drive before it went R/O, and none of them
> lasted long enough to copy the contents off to another
> drive.  Since then I've switched to RAID5 so I'll get the
> "array is degraded" message when there's actually time to
> do something about it.

I've never had SMART not throw a flag early enough. Even when my powersupply 
was causing problems SMART knew something was wrong and is the only reason I 
was able to rescue one of the drives. I lost one because I kept running them 
not knowing what the problem was.

>
> > I suggest paying the extra shipping cost to receive the new drive so you
> > can copy your data over. Keep an eye on the drive. I'll usually put it
> > into a ro mount and if gets really bad I unplug power to it until I get a
> > new drive.
>
> The drives that failed on me were two Maxtors and a Western
> Digital.  The Maxtors lasted long enough to be obsolete so
> I just chucked them.  The WD was only about 9 months old.
> WD's RMA process allows you to give them a CC number and
> they'll ship out the replacement by courier at no charge.
> You then have 30 days to swap the drive and ship back the
> defective one (at your expense) or else they charge the new
> drive to your card.  In my case, it was a 120Gb that failed
> and they sent me a 160Gb replacement.  All the same, when I
> decided to switch to RAID5 I bought more Maxtor drives.  If
> they last long enough to make an RMA pointless then I'll be
> happy.

This is one nice thing about the RMA process, getting a larger drive! this has 
happened to me twice ;-)

Steve