[ale] SATA Hard Drive Issues?

Greg Freemyer greg.freemyer at gmail.com
Wed Jan 27 11:26:46 EST 2010


Yes,

I had a dual drive failure a year and a half ago.  Both drives had
less than a couple hundred hours on them.

About that time, the mdraid mailing list started advising mixing your
raid sets up with drives from different manufactures.

In 2008 and early 2009 there were a bunch of bad drive lots floating
around.  We didn't have any DOAs, but we had maybe 10-20% fail in the
first few hundred operating hours.

The bad part is we did a multi-hour burn-in thinking that would catch
the bad from the factory drives.  None of these drives failed at that
early stage.

Greg

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 10:51 AM, Jim Popovitch <jimpop at gmail.com> wrote:
> Aren't identical drives subject to similar failures?
>
> -Jim P.
>
> On 2010-01-27, Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us> wrote:
>> On 01/27/2010 09:29 AM, gene.poole at macys.com wrote:
>>> Is it me or has anyone else experienced the lack of longevity of SATA
>>> drives? Over the past 6-months I've lost a Western Digital 320 GB Caviar,
>>> Seagate 500 GB Barracuda, and 2 Seagate 1 TB Barracuda (a 7200.11 and
>>> 7200.12) drives.
>>>
>>> I'm now running my main machine on a Hitachi 1 TB SATA II drive with my
>>> fingers crossed.
>>
>> I've found hard disks generally to be hit or miss.  On systems where I
>> cannot tolerate a total failure, I use a RAID array of two identical
>> drives, though if the data is really important I've been known to put
>> three identical drives in the system.
>>
>> Of course, I have *one* server that, at the moment, does not have any
>> redundant storage.  That is something I need to fix.  And the price of
>> blu-ray media needs to come down so that I can use it for backups
>> without breaking the bank...
>>
>> I am reminded of a story someone told me once, where they got a new job
>> in a position where the programs were done with punch cards, filing
>> cabinets full of them, because the person that had the position before
>> simply did not trust magnetic disks.  I couldn't advocate filling up
>> stacks of paper with programs for that reason, but I certainly know
>> better than to ever run with a single copy of anything around that's
>> important... because *I* don't trust magnetic disks.  :-)
>>
>>       --- Mike
>>
>> --
>> Michael B. Trausch                    Blog: http://mike.trausch.us/blog/
>> Tel: (404) 592-5746 x1                            Email: mike at trausch.us
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Greg Freemyer
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