[mythtv-users] Clone MythTV HDD

[David Brodbeck]

John Drescher wrote:
>> I have already returned 1 x WD, 1 x Maxtor and 3 x Seagates (all new) this
>> year already. Only Hitachi have been 100% for me.
>>
>>
> This year, I believe I returned 1 seagate SATA2 of the 100 seagates
> and an equal number of other manufacturers drives. All of which are
> spinning 24/7 at work. Out of all of these drives only a small few of
> these report remapped sectors and none of these have had anywhere near
> exhausted their extra sectors so that errors were seen on a filesystem
> level. Also some of the ide drives are 7 years old and still operating
> in raid 5 arrays.

I had one in the RAID array at work that I exchanged due to sector read 
errors.  Modern drives have so many spare sectors that that's pretty 
rare; usually when I have a drive failure it's complete and 
catastrophic, like failing to spin up.  This does mean that by the time 
a drive starts reporting bad sectors to the OS, it's already pretty far 
gone, though; for that reason I don't believe in letting the OS mark 
sectors as bad anymore.  When I see bad sectors the drive is done.

I did once crash the heads on a laptop drive by slamming the lid too 
hard.  *That* one reported quite a few bad sectors almost immediately.