[mythtv-users] Hard Drive reliability esp. RAID issues

[Travis Tabbal]

On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 7:56 AM, Richard Morton
<richard.e.morton at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> And the info I thought would be of specific interest here: One drive
> manufacturer specifies a significantly (an order of magnitude) more
> reliable than the other notable brands:
>
> > Western Digital’s Caviar Green, model WD20EADS, is spec’d at 10^15,
> from:
> http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=805&tag=nl.e539
>


The question is, what data do they have to back that up, and do they stand
behind it for that extra time. My guess is, very little, and no. It's not
like they are going to tell you "it's going to die any day now", even if
they know it is likely to. :) Any drive is a crapshoot, IMO. You might get
lucky, but it WILL die and you're better off planning for that. My server
was recently upgraded, and I'm now running RAID6 (raidz2) with 2 arrays for
a total of 4 parity drives. Kinda sucks to lose that much space to
protection, but with 1.5TB drives it takes so long to restripe in case of
failure that I want the extra protection.

The bigger question I would have for WD is, when are you going to stop
causing problems for people wanting to use your drives in a RAID config?
Even the latest drives seem to cause people problems with the TLER settings.
It's caused me to write off WD completely as I don't run non-RAID in
anything but a laptop these days. It's one thing if they set them up from
the factory that way if it makes things better for single-drive users, but
it should be configurable if it causes problems for other users. And no,
"buy the enterprise drives" is not an acceptable answer. They are overpriced
and unnecessary for home and SOHO setups.
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