[mythtv-users] The Bigger... Disk contest, Fall 2007 edition

[match at ece.utah.edu]

On 19 Oct 2007 at 16:48, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 10:54:51PM -0600, Marvin Match wrote:
> > Oh yeah... almost forgot... I have 8 Maxtors in 4 servers at work 
> > that have been running 24/7 for 4 years so far. Never lost any of 
> > them, either.
> > 
> > Just lucky? 
> 
> I dunno, but I sure wanna hire you to sit around in my machine room.
> 
> :-)
 
LOL! I always enjoy your posts, Jay.

I just don't see failures. I have about 100 Windows boxes I run in 4 university 
student labs. All rackmount cases... Anyway every few years I pull them all 
down, strip the guts out and refill the cases with whatever the current 
hardware flavor is. I try to do this about every 3 or 4 years if the money is 
available.

Over the years I've bought (in order) Samsung, Seagate, IBM Deskstar, 
Maxtor, and this last go-around Seagate again. That's about 400-500 drives 
total, and I don't remember ever having one fail, although I'm sure one or two 
have. Come to think of it I dropped one on a concrete floor... that one failed... 
it was a Samsung. I was so embarrassed I didn't even try to get it warrateed, 
especially since it had a chunk of asphalt tile stuck to the corner. They all get 
power cycled several times a day, and they are all heavily used and abused 
by college students.

All but 22 of the cases do have an extra fan, and are bolted into racks. The 
other 22 are plain old (cheap) tower cases out on the workbenches, with no 
extra fans, and they get pushed around and bumped plenty. The labs that 
they reside in are air conditioned, but not climate controlled the way we do 
our machine rooms, just "adequately" so that we don't cook or freeze too 
many students. They're all just garden-variety consumer stuff, in other words, 
whichever model/brand I can buy cheapest that day, usually wins.

Everytime I upgrade, I have 100 or so used drives which I either give away, 
mostly to students, and they use them for another few years, or I recycle 
them into other projects, like NAS servers and other play toys, or they sit 
around in a cabinet for a few more years until I finally throw them away.

Come to think of it, my first MythTV box was built entirely out of these 
recycled parts, save the tuner card, which was a frame buffer.

I must be doing something wrong,eh?   :-)

Marvin