Re: Do I understand my RAID6 correctly?

[Yann Ormanns <yann-ormanns@web.de>]

Subject: Re: Do I understand my RAID6 correctly?
From: Stefan G. Weichinger <lists@xunil.at>
To: Yann Ormanns <yann-ormanns@web.de>
Date: 2011-04-12 19:03 (+0200)
>
> I already exported the controller-logs and will look through for SMART
> info. Unfortunately the controller does not allow the use of
> smartmontools, I can only use the specific ICP Storage Manager.
> 

I recommend to compare the active hours and the serial numbers of the
disks. So you can _perhaps_ predict the next disk with problems.
Unfortunately, SMART-data is no credible basis for any hard disk failure
predictions.
For further information, you may want to take a look at this german
link:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Google-Studie-zur-Ausfallursache-von-Festplatten-147178.html
and / or at this document http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

> 
> Scary. Yes, the server uses the same model for all 9 devices.

Yeah, that's really scary - it shows, that even with a RAID6 your data
is not absolutely safe. But I have to admit that this is "only" the
worst case scenario - the chance that this situation occurs, is really
small (but not impossible).
I suppose, that your customer keeps his backups up to date although he
uses a RAID6?

> From your domain I see that you seem to be located in germany, so you
> might know the manufacturer of the server: transtec.
> 

No, I do not know this manucaturer - but I'm just a private user, so I
don't really have any experiences with "real" servers :)

Best regards,
Yann