[mythtv-users] Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009

[Johnny Russ]

>
> Slightly OT
>
> One thing to add to those of you thinking of going RAID and is touched
> on in an earlier comment is that it's heat that kills drives.
>

I do not mean to be contrarian but I would refer you to the study that
Google did ([PDF] http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf). It
is a short document and you can glean the important points just by looking
at the graphs. It uses the largest sample set of hard drives ever for such a
study and It is one of the best resources for understanding what factors
actually cause drive failures. From the report:

The figure shows that failures do not increase when the average temperature
increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures
are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is
there a slight reversal of this trend.

They also found that average utilization doesn't correlate with drive
failures unless the drive is very new (< 6 months) or very old (> 5 years).
Another interesting tidbit is that only about half of the drives that failed
had warnings from failed SMART tests.
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