[lug] Backup

Sean Reifschneider jafo at tummy.com
Thu Dec 22 04:39:59 MST 2005


On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 10:17:40PM -0700, Daniel Webb wrote:
>On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 09:33:35PM -0700, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
>> I can't remember the last time I lost data because of a hard drive failure.
> 
>I have many times over the years, although the more recent times I had learned

Perhaps it's time to look at a different drive vendor, or making sure that
your drives are properly cooled?  One of the few failures of a hard drive I
had was in my laptop, a few weeks after I dropped it...  I can't really
complain about that one.  I have been using Hitachi/IBM drives, and they
seem to be quite solid.  As I said, something around 100 of them in service
with few problems.

I *HAVE* found cooling to be a problem in some cases.  If you don't keep
the drives cool to within their specs, they *WILL* fail and fail quickly.
Though the IBM drive I last had that problem with gave me several years of
additional service after I let it cool down and then kept it cool.

On that machine I had a couple of open drive bays because I lost the
plastic covers.  I ended up covering those bays with cardboard once I
noticed how hot the drive was getting, and after that it was just fine.
That was one of those IBM hard drives that everyone seemed to be having
problems with, so I wondered if cooling might have been the common problem
there.

I recently bought a cheap case and found that it didn't have reasonable
ventilation for any of the drive bays it had internally.  I was planning to
install a SATA hard drive bay system anyway, and that keeps them cool.

>I buy the cheapest drives, though, so maybe that makes it more likely?

Cheapest how?  ;-/

>Like I said before, I've
>seen about a dozen drives go belly up in 19 years, probably 1/3 of the drives

Well, 19 years ago drives were incredibly different.  In fact, Tandem has a
paper about hardware changes just from 1985 to 1990 and how they
dramatically reduced overall system problems to the point that operator
error was now dominating the outage causes, and hardware failures were
greatly reduced.  And that was just 5 years, 20 years ago.

Todays drives are a whole different breed.  Just 10 years ago I was
managing a cluster with 64 4GB drives in it, (taking up the space of a
refrigerator), and we could pretty much expect one drive to fail every 2 to
3 months...  Current drives over the last 5 years have been much less of an
issue for me.  Maybe I'm just extremely lucky.

>What *are* the best RAID monitoring solutions or techniques for Linux software
>RAID?

mdadm works just fine for software RAID.

Thanks,
Sean
-- 
 I didn't spend 6 years in evil medical school to be called *MISTER* Evil!
                 -- Dr. Evil, _Austin_Powers:_International_Man_of_Mystery_
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability




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