[mythtv-users] new rig ... help with specs

Travis Tabbal travis at tabbal.net
Tue Sep 22 15:04:02 UTC 2009


On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 8:31 AM, Richard Morton
<richard.e.morton at gmail.com>wrote:

> Its interesting hearing so many views on hd's.
>


IMO, what happens is that people get failures from a lot or manufacturer
over a short time and write them off for years. In the mean time, someone
else tries the brand and finds that they work fine, then suddenly they have
a problem later. It's all about timing. Every manufacturer has had a bad
batch or model for whatever reason. The Seagate 1.5TB fiasco is only the
most recent. I'm sure we all remember the "Deathstar" mess IBM had further
back as well, yet now people recommend Hitachi. Unfortunately, the trend
among consumer drive makers has been trending toward lower warranties and
cheaper components, increasing failure rates. With data density going up, I
have little faith in them anymore. I'm thinking that I'm going to have to go
to RAID6 or equivalent (RAIDZ2 on my fileserver) just because of the way the
makers have been doing things. It sucks to lose another drive worth of data,
but if it means I don't have to restore from backup, that's worth a lot to
me. Restoring takes forever when you're talking about TBs of data, even with
HDDs used for backups.

When Seagate went to 5 year warranties I gave them a chance. And I have had
great luck with those 400G drives. They are still running great. Now that
they are back to 3 years, I'm not sure who to buy from. I'm seriously
considering paying the price penalty for "RAID Class/Enterprise" drives for
the longer warranties, even though it approaches 50%. Sort of defeats the
"I" in "RAID", but what is one to do? Or I can buy a couple extra 1.5TB $100
drives and do RAIDZ2 or RAIDZ3 and just expect to lose one or two here and
there I guess. Tradeoffs, always the tradeoffs. :)
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