[lug] IDE RAID and good hardrives

[D. Stimits]

j davis wrote:

> Hello,
> So I am mailing the list today from my hotmail account due to
> the crashing of my workstations linux drive(in windoz now).
> This drive makes 138 gigs lost in less that a year. 120 of those
> gigs were drives that were less than a year old. The three 40gig'ers
> were IBM,WD,Maxtor. The only drive I have now had more than a year that
> has not crashed is a 40gig Segate.
>
> Can some one tell me whos drives have the longest ETBF and maybe
> a good site that keeps up with such things...I mean one minute
> IBM is the best...next thing you know there putting out IDE lemons!
> So hard to keep up...
>
> So, I am going to order a IDE raid card...proably the 3ware 7000
> that George Sexton reviewed not to long ago. So...George..is that
> still working out pretty good?
>
> I would like to mirror 2 80 gig drives and format as fat so windoz
> and Linux can have access...does anyone forsee a problem with this?
>
> One last.. I have read about breaking a mirrored raid set. Looks
> stright forward on paper. Is this the case in real life?
>
Just some drive comments. If you reboot a lot, with power going off/on, 
then this is probably what IDE is on "average" designed for, while long 
hours of operation without frequent power cycling is on "average" what 
SCSI is designed for. In every case, even minor heat increases cause 
major reduction in expected life. A while back I was revamping an old 
machine with tiny outdated scsi, and had heat problems...one fan and the 
entire drive cage is barely detectible as being over room temperature. 
Before you replace drives with something expensive, check if they are 
being properly cooled/vented. If your machine is being run long hours 
and not power cycled, consider scsi replacements...which also can be 
quite a benefit in some RAID cases. I haven't heard much good about IDE 
RAID controllers, but that is probably because I'm not too interested in it.

In terms of scsi, the Seagate drives seem extremely reliable from my own 
experiences (especially 10k rpm Cheetahs, but also ancient 4 GB and 9 GB 
scsi), but I still have a little 640 MB and 1.2 GB IDE running that are 
probably 8 years old (they are also quite slow).

D. Stimits, stimits AT attbi DOT com