[mythtv-users] Hard drive failure -- recovery method suggestions

Stephen Worthington stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz
Wed Apr 29 15:20:27 UTC 2015


On Tue, 28 Apr 2015 18:13:00 -0400, you wrote:

>On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 5:45 PM, Mark Perkins <perkins1724 at hotmail.com>
>wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 29 Apr 2015, at 5:53 am, "Jerry" <mythtv at hambone.e4ward.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 3:57 PM, Gary Buhrmaster <
>> gary.buhrmaster at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 11:57 PM, Jerry <mythtv at hambone.e4ward.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> ....
>>> > I'm not sure if I can salvage anything at this point and I'm not sure I
>>> want
>>> > to spend days trying to grab whatever is left.
>>>
>>> I suggest that at this point, it is time to walk away.  You
>>> are going to be spending those days you stated you
>>> did not want to spend to try all the ideas and likely
>>> recover some small part of the data.
>>>
>>> "He's dead, Jerry".
>>>
>>
>> Agreed.  Yeah, I think it's time to shoot the horse.
>>
>> Thanks to everyone for the advice.  I'll file a claim and get a new drive.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>>
>>
>> My condolences on your loss Jerry.
>>
>> On a slightly different note, I think I saw that yours was a 3Tb Seagate
>> drive. IIRC there is a Backblaze study that shows they have an unusually
>> high failure rate.
>>
>> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/
>>
>> It would appear to me that your experience may align very closely to the
>> Backblaze experience.
>>
>>
>Yep, that's the one.  I heard some bad things after I bought it.
>Unfortunately, I have another one in my computer now.  It might be a newer
>generation, but I'm not sure.  Only time will tell.

The BackBlaze studies so far have found high failure rates for pretty
much all their Seagate drives intended for the consumer market.  That
has been my experience also.  The last reliable Seagate consumer drive
I have is the 7200.10 series (three 500 Gbyte drives that I still have
in operation).  The 7200.11 drives were a disaster - only one of the
five I had lasted, and that is probably only because it has spent most
of its time switched off.  I had one that was replaced under warranty
and the replacement died within a month!  The 7200.12s are better, but
by then I had switched to Hitachi and WD, so the only ones of them I
have were warranty replacements for 7200.11s.  I recently got a
Seagate 4 Tbyte drive, but I made sure to get a NAS rated one rather
than a pure consumer model (ST4000VN000).  So far it has performed
well in 24x7 service.  It is currently showing 610 days powered on
with no hint of problems, which I believe is longer than any of the
7200.11s lasted.  My two Hitachi HDS723030ALA640 drives are at 1528
and 1410 days with no problems at all.  And I have various 2, 3 and 4
Tbyte WD Green drives with in-between ages and no problems, and a 1.5
TB WD Green that died at about 5 years.  The most recent drives I have
bought are WD NAS rated WD60EFRX 6 Tbyte drives, but they are too
young yet to know if they are going to be reliable (255 and 148 days).

The oldest working drive I have is an 8 Gbyte 10,000 rpm IBM SCSI
drive, still running in my OS/2 box.  It was bought before the 36
Gbyte 15,000 rpm Seagate SCSI drive (which died a couple of years
ago), and I have the paperwork on that one saying I got it in 2001, so
the IBM is 2000 or maybe before.  It has been running 24x7 for all
that time!  So clearly there is no need for drives to actually die
young if they are built properly.  But buying cheaply built consumer
grade drives is a bit hit and miss, and very much miss with Seagates
over the last few years.  I do not expect my WD Green drives to last
as long as the IBM SCSI, but they will likely last until they are
replaced by larger drives, which the Seagate consumer drives do not.


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