[mythtv-users] INFO: RAID comparison for MythTV

[Allan Stirling]

Bryce wrote:
> On Thu, April 21, 2005 4:15 pm, MagicITX said:
> 
> 
>>>As another hint - Start your RAID small and grow it. Buying your disks
>>>all at once means that they'll all tend to fail at once - Which is not a
>>>good thing. Unfortunately, there's no easy, reliable way I've found to
>>>extend a RAID without backing up (somewhere really huge :) and
>>>restoring.
> 
> 
> That's a myth about RAIDs and hard drives in general. I've built and
> maintained many many RAIDs over the years (with several of them running
> for years) and never have experienced a noticeable increase in drive
> failures or drives failing closer together, etc. Nor have I ever had a
> vendor even suggest such a procedure. Hard drives basically fail regularly
> and randomly over the entire life of the RAID. Even when EMC installs
> their big $500K frames, they don't add drives bit by bit or even from
> different manufacturing runs.

This may be true for SCSI drives, or the "higher end" of IDE. However, I 
bought 9 drives and had 2 fail in the first month. On an array where 
each drive is used identically, you can't get away from the "bathtub" 
failure curve.

Yes, the solution should be don't buy cheap drives. But I like my I in 
my RAID.

Cheers,

Allan.