[mythtv-users] OT: 3 week old HDD "Clicking" ??

[Bill Williamson]

On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 10:13 AM, Dale Pontius <DEPontius at edgehp.net> wrote:

> Anthony Giggins wrote:
>
>> How about this for a Seagate Horror story,
>>
>> I bought a 750GB ST3750330AS it lasted 8 months and then failed without
>> warning loosing all the data including several GB of the wifes data. --WAF
>>
>> Drive was replaced with a refurbished drive which lasted a further 7
>> months and started failing with bad sectors but I was able to backup all
>> the data before sending it back.
>>
>> That drive was replaced with another refurbished drive, I started copying
>> a few GB of data back onto the replaced drive to find Bad sectors in the
>> first day of use, spoke to a Seagate tech who said this is in spec and to
>> scan with the Seatools for DOS util which found errors and "repaired" them
>> but as soon as I booted back into Windows the bad block errors returned,
>> I'm now backing everything up on this drive constantly waiting for the
>> immanent failure, I haven't had time to chase this up with Seagate or do
>> any further testing but I think that will be my last purchase of a seagate
>> drive.
>>
>> On the upside I guess, the warranty is renewed on each replacement drive.
>> At this rate the drive will be in warranty for atleast the next decade.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Anthony
>>
>
> OK, that tears it.  Right now my main Myth machine has Maxtor 160G and 200G
> drives, with OS and data spread across both.  My wish has been that someday
> I'd get a pair of terabyte drives and put them in a RAID-1, but every now
> and then I've thought that TV really isn't that important, neither is OS
> install.  My /home directories are NFS mounted, and on the server they're on
> a RAID-1 pair, with a backup server and a backup RAID-1 pair.
>
> But listening to this, I'm starting to think that RAID-1 is a good idea.
>  Better yet, make sure that the 2 drives are not just different brands, but
> different heritage brands.  (Do any drive makers now simply re-badge drives
> from another brand?)  That way I avoid any bad batch problems, since 2
> drives bought at the same time may very well have similar manufacturing
> dates.  It's bad enough that stuffing drives into a RAID set gives them
> identical histories, at least getting different makers eases that.
>

Raid 1/raid 5/raid 6 are about uptime.  NOT about replacing a backup.  What
will you do if there's a power supply surge, and your different brand
different tiem drives both go?

If your goal is 24/7 availability then RAID is a good idea.

If your goal is surviving a disk outage or other problem then it's not.
It's not a bad idea, it just won't help anything.
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