[mythtv-users] An LVM'd drive died! What do I do...

[chris at cpr.homelinux.net]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 11:30:07AM -0400, Steve Adeff wrote:
> noone has yet mentioned S.M.A.R.T. yet. After I went through a stint of 
> loosing 2 hd's in a week's time (due to powersupply problems) I looked into 
> things and found smartctl, which monitors the smart status of drives and can 
> even be setup to email you when it encounters a problem. According to 
> manufacturers warranty's upon a SMART pre-fail warning you are allowed to, if 
> the drive is still under warranty, get a replacement.

IMHO, SMART is like the sound from a rifle - if you're in 
front of the bullet you'll never hear it.  I've had three 
SMART-enabled drives fail on me.  In every case, the email 
saying "a drive is dying" was just about the last thing 
written to the drive before it went R/O, and none of them 
lasted long enough to copy the contents off to another 
drive.  Since then I've switched to RAID5 so I'll get the 
"array is degraded" message when there's actually time to 
do something about it.

> I suggest paying the extra shipping cost to receive the new drive so you can 
> copy your data over. Keep an eye on the drive. I'll usually put it into a ro 
> mount and if gets really bad I unplug power to it until I get a new drive. 

The drives that failed on me were two Maxtors and a Western 
Digital.  The Maxtors lasted long enough to be obsolete so 
I just chucked them.  The WD was only about 9 months old.  
WD's RMA process allows you to give them a CC number and 
they'll ship out the replacement by courier at no charge.  
You then have 30 days to swap the drive and ship back the 
defective one (at your expense) or else they charge the new 
drive to your card.  In my case, it was a 120Gb that failed 
and they sent me a 160Gb replacement.  All the same, when I 
decided to switch to RAID5 I bought more Maxtor drives.  If 
they last long enough to make an RMA pointless then I'll be 
happy.

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