[mythtv-users] Western Digital Red for Myth

[Raymond Wagner]

On 8/24/2013 11:57 AM, Craig Treleaven wrote:
> At 10:49 AM -0400 8/24/13, Raymond Wagner wrote:
>> ... the RED drives are nothing more than a change in firmware and a
>> longer warranty. Specifically, they enable TLER, so that if they're
>> stalled trying to exhaustively recover data, they cancel the attempt
>> before a hardware RAID array rejects them as faulted. If you're not
>> running hardware RAID, there's really no point to getting "NAS
>> friendly" drives.
>
> So, what do you recommend?  Simply look for the cheapest cost per GB?
> I'd pay a bit of a premium for drives that will last 5+ years.

It's a crapshoot. Aside from the occasional bad batch, there's no 
meaningful correlation between one manufacturer or or line and higher 
reliability. Expect any hard drive will fail on you and go from there. I 
see warranties as how long I expect to use that storage, rather than how 
long I expect any specific drive. After about three years, I'm usually 
looking to expand my storage, and have no real desire to replace the 
drives if they do fail.

> BTW, the other thing I meant to mention was heat.  The Tom's review
> points out that these drives run cooler by 4 degrees Celsius compared to
> regular desktop drives.  (Which makes sense with the lower rotation
> speed and reduced power consumption.)  Heat generally equals reduced life.

I wouldn't trust that too much. They're reading the temperature given 
out by SMART, which is only consistent within a single line from a 
single manufacturer. It's a means to compare a drive to itself, and 
monitor changes over time for warning signs. My RAID card serves out 
temperature data over SNMP and I used to log it. There's a good 10C 
difference between my Samsung drives and my Seagate drives, but I've not 
seen any higher failure rate out of them.

All I can tell is that right now, drives 10-12 are reading much higher 
than other similar drives, so I need to go down to my basement and see 
if the fan on that disk pack has failed.