[mythtv-users] > 1TB Hard Drive Recommendations

Paul Bender pebender at san.rr.com
Sat Oct 3 17:36:59 UTC 2009


John Finlay wrote:
> I recently tried to upgrade my storage with a Seagate LP 1.5TB hard 
> drive but it started failing almost immediately. Shortly thereafter my 6 
> month old 1TB western digital drive failed and I got a warranty 
> replacement from WD which started failing after 2 weeks (another 
> replacement is on the way). This experience and the problems I've seen 
> others have with Seagate drives makes me wary of buying more WD or 
> Seagate drives and thinking about trying other brands.
> 
> I'm looking for recommendations on which >1TB drives would be reliable 
> for mythtv storage.

Over the past decade, I have had Samsung, Seagate and WD drives fail. 
However, since increasing the cooling of the my Myth backend's drives 
(more fans blowing across the drives), I have had no problems (post hoc 
ergo propter hoc).

Based on my experiences, I have concluded two things: (1) hard disk 
reliability is about the same for all major vendors, and (2) RAID 1 is a 
very good idea.

Currently, my backend has Seagate 750MB drives in RAID 1 for its 
non-recording drives and Western Digital 2GB drives in RAID 1 for its 
recording drives. So far, I have had no problems (including drive 
problems). However, I am not so arrogant to assume that I will not have 
disk problems, so I will continue to use a RAID 1 configuration.


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