Re: Using S.M.A.R.T. on a Software RAID
On Thu, 15 Jan 2004, Robert James Kaes wrote:
> Thanks for the information. I also have my hard drives cooled (in
> this case, each hard drive has three fans blowing across it.) I also
> buy my hard drives locally and generally use Western Digital or
> Maxtor. These drives are great; however, _any_ drive will fail
> eventually. I'm just wondering if accessing /dev/hda and /dev/hdb
> when they're in a software RAID (/dev/md) is possible when using a
> tool like smartctl to retrieve the SMART information from each drive.
depending on the drives, ide cable and bios ...
- if hda fails, you may or may not be able to get to hdb
if you only have 2 disks, you should use hda and hdc
and put your dcrom/dvd ( if any ) on ide cables by itself
- never mix ide disks (ata66/100/133) with slow cdrom/dvd(ata33)
( if in a mixed environment, you will get occasional missed
( disk/data interrupts
when a drive fails... hopefully.. its 3yrs or 5 yrs later...
at which points its a dont care non-issue....
- if it dies in 3 months, a year, ... find a new disk seller
> Even with all the cooling I have currently in the system, I've had
> drives fail. I would like them monitored so that I can have a new
> drive ready before the old drive dies. Using RAID mitigates the
> problem to some extent, but it's not a complete solution.
yes... raid helps a little ...
- in say 500 disks... i have 4 failed disks in 5 yrs
roughly ( 1% over 5 years )
and since its them deskstars, those failed disks doesnt count
> I would test this out myself except that I have only one software
> RAID system and it's in 24/7 production right now, so I don't really
> want to mess with it without knowing exactly what will happen.
... time to spend time/resouces to build a 2nd raid array...
vs waiting for it to fail
c ya
alvin
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