[mythtv] Disk Failures (was Preemptive Disk Writes)

[Yan-Fa Li]

I'd be really interested to see if your drive actually has a better 
lifetime than drives that are on constantly.  I'm a big believer in 
leaving server drives running constantly, but I also know that heat is 
the biggest factor contributing to modern hard disk death.

Spinning up should not be an issue these days as most manufacturers have 
long ago fixed the issue with stiction that used to plague certain 
brands back in the day.  I've seen drives that have start stop numbers 
in the 50K range for a Hitachi Deskstar 7K400.  Even if you start and 
stop the drive 10 times a day that's 13 years worth.  The drive will be 
toast long before that.

One of the advantages of spinning down the drive is less wear and tear 
overall and no heat production versus wear and tear on the motor due to 
startup and expansion and contraction stress from cold to operating 
temperature.  I've had three drives fail on me recently, all of them 
were left running constantly, mostly they were older junk drives 
recycled from other systems but all of them had working motors but 
failing mechanical systems.  Most of the drives I've helped fix recently 
also had working motors, but failed sectors or mechanical problems.

My feeling these days is that drive spin up problems are a thing of the 
past and that actual media and mechanical read head failure due to heat 
stress are greater factors.

Yan

Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>>>
>>>Statistically speaking, your drive is way more likely to fail on spin
>>>up, than in the middle of spinning at full speed. All the drives I've
>>>ever had which failed, the cause was a failure to spin up.
>>
>>That's not at all what he's talking about - perhaps you were just giving a
>>heads up though?
> 
> 
> That was certainly how I read it: it expands to "don't do that, it's a
> bad idea, and here's why:".  I'm not sure I agree, but certainly, it's
> OT for this list.  :-)
> 
> Cheers,
> -- jra
>