[Tfug] And another one down

[Bexley Hall]

Hi Timothy,

On 9/7/2013 5:56 PM, Timothy D. Lenz wrote:
> It's 4 drives  in paired mirrors. And it's those Seagate 500Gb drives.
> I've lost track of how many times one of them as gone bad. Same thing
> each time, a bit of noise like drive access and then the array is
> degraded. Sometimes it takes awhile for maadam to figure it out. several
> times it showed on reboot with a strange messed up failed boot and on
> the second try it comes up. C/D is only a data array, so it won't even
> effect any reboot.

Wow, you really seem to be having problems, there!  Are you
sure it's the drives' fault?  I.e., do they have a reputation
for being "bad"?

I've got a mix of drives in the machines here:  capacities
(146/160/250/500/1000/2000/3000GB) interfaces (Wide SCSI/SCA/SATA/PATA)
manufacturers (Fujitsu/IBM-Hitachi/Seagate/WD).  To date, the only
drives I've had "die" are a pair of laptop drives and a "Zune"
drive (does that even count?).

I had one PATA drive that wouldn't boot at one point.  But reinstalling
the system image "fixed" that problem (so, no idea if it was a drive
failure or just something getting corrupted)

OTOH, aside from *this* (email/inet) machine and my DNS/TFTP/BOOTP/etc
server, none of the machines run 24/7/365 (at ~20W/spindle, I'm not
keen on all those extra BTU's...)

> I do have other stuff on there, a TS server, and VDR, web server for
> when I need to share a file with someone, etc.. And I don't want to have
> to go through setting any of that up again. So far mirroring has come
> through every time. Just have to figure out the steps each time to swap
> the drive out and get the array back up.

But if you keep encountering the same problem, repeatedly (?), one
has to ask how this is working towards *solving* that problem!
I.e., have you done anything to identify if it is a problem with
the drives, the system, the usage patterns, the software, etc.?
Or, are you just treating *symptoms*?  (which suggests you will have
to *keep* treating them in the future)

> I was saving up to buy a second ship in the new game Star Citizen. The
> game is in pre alpha but the money goes to developement of the game and
> because I am a veteran backer having got the base game before the cut
> off for veteran status, If i get the ship before nov 26, it comes with
> in game life time insurance which isn't much, just one less thing to
> spend in game credits on. Everything sold now except LTI ships will be
> buyable in game with in game money. Purely F2P. But looks like I'll be
> getting a drive instead. If this drive is out of warranty, I'll be
> looking at getting a WD Red drive to replace it.

Gotta have "priororities"
     --Archie