On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 4:37 PM, John Robinson <john.robinson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 29/10/2010 00:17, Mark Knecht wrote: >> I saw in Fry's San Jose ad today they were selling these >> Serial-ATA/300 drives for $67. They didn't give a model number but >> scouting around a bit on the web I'm guessing they are a discontinued >> model. >> >> Any inputs on whether these are drives that work well with mdadm RAID? >> Do they support TLER and otherwise work well? >> >> This would just be a home server of some type, nothing industrial. >> Probably a 3 drive RAID-1 or something like that. > > Well, they're perhaps not great. I bought three and after only about a > thousand hours one of them was giving SMART errors, then after about 7,500 > hours a second one started doing it too. At that point I replaced both with > other makes, copying over with ddrescue (or maybe it was dd_rescue), which > worked without any failed sectors, then ran badblocks -w on the Samsungs and > the SMART errors went away. The third one of mine is still fine, and the > other two are now in a ReadyNAS giving good service. I think that using two different brand drives in general is a good idea. We recently had 2 500 GB WD5000AAKS drives die at the same time over a weekend. Both of them suffered from the same death and would no longer spin up - just making a clicking/whirring sound when you powered it on. Luckily we had backups for most of the data on there, but some non-critical (but time consuming to manually restore) data had to be reconstructed. I understand that drives from the same batch will often die around the same period of time - from now on we plan on trying to use dissimilar drives when possible. First time we've seen 2 drives in one array die that close together and that catastrophically, though. -Dave -- 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
