Re: 3TB drives failure rate

[Roman Mamedov <rm@romanrm.ru>]

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On Sun, 28 Oct 2012 15:07:53 -0600
Chris Murphy <lists@colorremedies.com> wrote:

> 
> On Oct 28, 2012, at 2:50 PM, Chris Murphy <lists@colorremedies.com> wrote:
> 
> > For any serious use I just wouldn't use the Greens, without very non-consumer like scrubs, extended smart tests, and cycling out drives so they could be ATA Enhance Secure Erase nuked say once a year or maybe more often. And a rigorous backup. With that kind of expertise and dedication should come a better budget for a better drive.
> 
> On 2nd thought, I'd consider the greens something like a "hostile witness" in legal jargon. Relegate them to only ZFS or btrfs (or ReFS maybe, unclear) for "raid" like pooling or redundancy. The drives themselves are inherently suspect so a suspicious grand inquisitor of a file system seems like an appropriate match, to constantly 2nd guess them.

Now you are moving into unfounded superstitions territory.

You seem to imply that a Green drive would return just plain bad data in some
failure condition (else why all the checksumming FSes?), and not an IO Error.
I don't think anything of this sort has been demonstrated so far, and while
this could happen due to bad RAM/chipset/controller/bus/cache/etc, this would
have nothing to do specifically with "Greenness" of a drive, nor any
particular model would be inherently more prone to that.

> But still, once a drive is asked to retrieve an LBA, so long as the drive eventually reports it back correctly, the file system won't correct that sector merely for a delay, even if it is up to 2 minutes or whatever it is. So, filesystem choice doesn't really solve the delay problem. You just have to obliterate the disk periodically with zeros or secure erase.

I do not think there is a state in modern HDDs that there would be a sector
which consistently takes 30-120 seconds to read. Those are either unreadable at
all, or readable after a delay -- and then already remapped by the HDD into the
reserved zone, so the delay is not there the next time.

-- 
With respect,
Roman

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Stallman had a printer,
with code he could not see.
So he began to tinker,
and set the software free."

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