Re: RAID

[Corey Hickey <bugfood-ml@fatooh.org>]

lordSauron wrote:
> True...  makes me wonder about the frequency of drive faliures.  Those
> who have experience: how often does that happen?  I've never had a
> drive fail in my life, but I'm your normal desktop user so my PC is
> off for about 8-16 hours a day.

It might actually be more stressful on a hard drive to power it on and
off once per day than it would be to just leave it on 24/7. Accelerating
the platters requires a lot more work from the motor than simply
maintaining constant velocity.

Compared to constant operation, it would certainly be worse to turn a
hard drive on and off with a period of one minute, and it would be
better with a period of one year; I just don't know know at what point
on the continuum once per day lies. Is it better or worse? Since this
thread is somewhat off-topic anyway, does anyone care to venture a guess?

I've had four IDE drives die on me over the years:

1. Western Digital 3.2GB 5400RPM. This survived about 2 years of mixed
usage. At first it was power-cycled often, but later on I left it on
more of the time. The failure was a sudden head crash.

2. Maxtor 30GB 5400RPM. This one died after only a few months with a
sudden head crash (it got very hot, too). I replaced it with a 1 year
old Maxtor 27GB 7200RPM, and it's still working now after 4 years of
constant operation.

3. Western Digital 120GB 7200RPM. This drive gradually got very noisy,
and eventually Linux started reporting DriveReady SeekComplete errors.
Over a few days, these errors got more and more frequent.

4. Toshiba 40GB 4200RPM laptop drive. When I bought a used laptop I
figured I'd have to replace the hard drive. A month later I got
DriveReady SeekComplete errors. Over a few days, the errors got more and
more frequent.

In all, that's about 1/8 of all the drives I've owned or operated. I've
also seen 5 or 6 other people's hard drives fail. 3 of those were IBM
Deathstar 60GXPs.

-Corey