I learned years ago that Maxtor drives have a high failure rate. I had hoped they improved over the years, I guess not. My last Maxtor drive was 800 Meg. Way overkill. :) Those were the days. Most of the time Maxtor drives have the best price. You get what you paid for. I like SeaGate myself. But they have had some lemons. But those were 1 model. Something to consider. A bad block does not indicate a failed drive. However, this point is debatable. There is a reason they have spare blocks. Most or all drives can re-locate a bad block to a spare. Guy -----Original Message----- From: linux-raid-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:linux-raid-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Robin Bowes Sent: Monday, November 15, 2004 3:57 PM To: David Greaves Cc: linux-raid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: RAID5 - 2nd drive died whilst waiting for RMA David Greaves wrote: > Then RMA *this* Maxtor and hope to resync in a couple of weeks (well, > actually - these drives seem so damned unreliable I guess I'm going to > *have* to buy a spare) > > FYI these are 250Gb Maxtor SATA disks. David, I use the same drives; I've had a *terrible* failure rate with the them. I bought 6 drives - 2 from separate vendors on eBay (d1, d2) plus 4 more from another vendor (d3-d6). d3 turned out to be faulty so I asked the vendor to replace it. He said I could, or I could RMA it direct with Maxtor. This I did as it meant I could get a replacement quicker. However, when I provided the drive serial no. for the RMA it turned out to be stolen - as did the other 3 drives from the same vendor (d4-d6) so I returned all 4 to the vendor and got 4 more (d7-10) after first checking the serial nos to make sure they weren't stolen! Anyway, I checked the drives when I got them with the Maxtor PowerMax utility - 3 out of the 4 were faulty (d7-d9). I RMAd all three back to Maxtor and got 3 more (d11-d13). So far (touch wood) all six are still working OK. Let's look at a summary: d1 OK d2 OK d3 Failed d4 Returned untested d5 Returned untested d6 Returned untested d7 Failed d8 Failed d9 Failed d10 OK d11 OK d12 OK d13 OK So, of the 10 drives I tested, four failed - That's a 40% failure rate. Needless to say I decided to configure my RAID5 array with a spare: [root@dude geeklog]# mdadm --detail /dev/md5 /dev/md5: Version : 00.90.01 Creation Time : Thu Jul 29 21:41:38 2004 Raid Level : raid5 Array Size : 974566400 (929.42 GiB 997.96 GB) Device Size : 243641600 (232.35 GiB 249.49 GB) Raid Devices : 5 Total Devices : 6 Preferred Minor : 5 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Mon Nov 15 20:55:23 2004 State : clean Active Devices : 5 Working Devices : 6 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 1 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 128K UUID : a4bbcd09:5e178c5b:3bf8bd45:8c31d2a1 Events : 0.1716573 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 2 0 active sync /dev/sda2 1 8 18 1 active sync /dev/sdb2 2 8 34 2 active sync /dev/sdc2 3 8 50 3 active sync /dev/sdd2 4 8 66 4 active sync /dev/sde2 5 8 82 - spare /dev/sdf2 R. -- http://robinbowes.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
