[mythtv-users] Western Digital Red for Myth

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 24 Aug 2013 10:10:40 -0400, you wrote:

>Hi:
>
>I've just had another hdd go bad on my Myth backend.  Maybe it is the 
>enclosures I've used but this has been a regular occurrence.  Thus 
>the following article caught my eye:
>
>http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/red-wd20efrx-wd30efrx-nas,3248.html
>
>Western Digital is apparently positioning these drives between 
>desktop and server in terms of features and price.  Low power 
>consumption and rated for full 24/7 operation seem very attractive 
>for use as a Myth recordings drive.  The relatively modest 
>performance doesn't sound like much of a penalty.
>
>What say you?
>
>Craig

There is competition - I was looking for a 4 Tbyte drive and have just
ordered one of these:

  http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?ItemID=415674

They are available in smaller sizes too.  (Note: NZ$ on that page, and
drives are cheaper in most parts of the world than they are in NZ).

But all of these are new drives - until there are enough of them
around, there is no way to know if they are any good or not.  I bought
several Seagate 7200.11 one Tbyte drives when they came out, and every
single one of them has died early in the same manner - lots of bad
sectors started to appear, then they appeared faster and faster until
there were too many to be remapped.  And when replaced by another
7200.11, the replacement has also died early, so it got to the point
where I refused to accept a 7200.11 as a replacement.  The supplier
did not quibble about that and replaced with later models that are
fine, so I expect they had been having to replace lots of them.

But the Seagate 7200.10 and 7200.12 drives I have from the year before
and the year after are fine.  It must just have been a design error in
the 7200.11 ones, which was fixed in the next design.

I have one 500 Mbyte 7200.10 now in my mother's MythTV box that is
reporting 2283 days of power on time (6.25 years) with no problems
ever.  I have an old 8 Gbyte IBM 10,000 RPM SCSI drive that is at
least 9 years old now in my OS/2 box and it has been running 24x7 for
all that time, but a 15,000 RPM 21 Gbyte Seagate drive that was at
least 2 years younger died two years ago.  So some drives are just
good, and some are bad, and some in between, and you can not really
tell until they have been around for a while.

That said, the desktop drives are now advertised as not being 24x7
capable, so I expect that there would be problems getting them
replaced if they fail when used 24x7.  Older desktop drives did not
have this sort of low specification.  So I am thinking that for 24x7
use such as a MythTV box, it is now probably necessary to buy at least
these "NAS rated" sorts of drives.  But time will tell.