Re: Journaling pointless with today's hard disks?

Pedro M. Rodrigues
2001-11-25T13:53:15Z

With those Seagates you probably just got yourself something else to
worry about, maybe even more sneaky than disks failing completely after
one year. I've had a $40.000+ external raid system (brand withhold),
promising reliability and data security at all levels, and with enough bells
and whistles to bore a "geek". It came with Hitachi disks and that surprised
me, because that box was replacing a same brand one that was sold with
IBM disks - the best and the only thing they used, i was told. I thought
maybe they knew something we don't, or maybe they were really special.
Anyway, some time later we started having complete disk lockups in the
device. Honest, the hardware would find a bad block in one of the disks
with parity that weren't remaped. And for some reason the hardware would
just freeze after some time. After checking with support we were sent a
new batch of disks to replace the current ones, with a different firmware
level. It did the trick. After backing up and restoring 360GB of data, of
course. But this begs for some questions. And it really makes me worry
about where the industry is going. Is it the increasing complexity of the
technology? Are they cutting too many corners on trying to reach the
market sooner? Or just cost cutting with old fashioned second source
suppliers? I am more and more worried about what passes as "enterprise
level storage" these days.

/Pedro

On 24 Nov 2001 at 23:20, Pete Zaitcev wrote:

>
> IBM Deskstar is completely broken, and that's a fact.
>
> BTW, hpa went on how he was buying IBM drives, how good they were, and
> what a surprise it was that IBM fucked Deskstar. Hardly a surprise.
> The first time I heard of IBM drive was a horror story. Our company
> was making RAID arrays, and we sourced new IBM SCSI disks. They were
> qualified through a rigorous testing as it was the procedure in the
> company. So, after a while they started to fail. It turned out that
> bearings leaked grease to platters. Of course, we shipped tens of
> thousands of those when IBM explained to us that every one of them
> will die in a year. We shipped Seagates ever after.
>
> -- Pete
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