Re: More tales of horror from the linux (HW) raid crypt

[Harry Mangalam <hjm@tacgi.com>]

Thanks for the note - I'd also be interested in what drives people people use 
that seem to be robust and which are having problems.  The 3ware tech that I 
spoke to recommended the WD-SD series, but a local senior sysadmin has warned 
his entire dept off WD drives for the reasons I've mentioned.  He rec'ed 
Seagate (5 year warr) and Hitachi.  So far the only good thing that I can say 
about WD is that their return policy has been relatively smooth (tho they 
smoothly keep returning bad drives :( )

I personally buy IBM (now Hitachi I think) and Seagate and have always avoided 
WD as being cheap and cheesy.  5 years ago when I was a sysadmin, I was 
replacing WD at probably 5 times the rate of anything else.  It was probably 
strongly influenced by the fact that more people were using them than the 
others but I don't think I've ever had an IBM or seagate 3.5" die (have a 
teetering stack of working ones that just got too small to bother with).  I 
figured that since WD was still in business (tho seeming always on the verge 
of going bust) their quality must have improved, but maybe not.

Happy to be contradicted.  If there's a 'Consumer's Reports' for HD 
reliability on the web, I couldn't find it.  Maybe it's time to set one up - 
with SMART disk records, it's possible to get more reliable runtime records 
and data than just the usual single point or small data set that individuals 
can provide (and you can bet that most vendors aren't going to make their 
failures public..).

Perhaps something like the CDDB, where a you can run an applet on a cronjob 
that will upload your disk's SMART data cache to a remote DB on a regular 
basis, so the millions of disks out there can be profiled.  Hmmm - sounds 
like a good undergrad project. Did someone say Summer of Code? 
(http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html)

hjm




On Wednesday 22 June 2005 12:33 pm, Mike Hardy wrote:
> Not that I wish bad luck on anyone, but I always enjoy reading about
> problems others have had and how they solved them, so I don't have to
> learn the hard way. Hopefully your situation gets sorted out.

-- 
Cheers, Harry
Harry J Mangalam - 949 856 2847 (vox; email for fax) - hjm@tacgi.com 
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