hard drive problem

On Sunday 27 August 2006 01:31, The Natural Philosopher stood up and addressed the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.miscas follows...:

That's why servers typically employ SCSI disks. You know that there's a reason why they're about four times as expensive as an IDE disk, don't you? ;-)

The machines themselves, yes. The hard disks mounted in them typically have a warranty period of one to three years, and almost die within months after that period expires, if not sooner.

IDE hard disks are intended to be used only about 8 hours per day, with about 2 hours in total during that 8-hour timespan of being under heavy load.

SCSI hard disks are intended to be up 24-7, with about 80% of that time being under heavy load. Their MTBF - I know, it's just a number - is usually around 1'000'000 hours, which boils down to about 138 years under continuous service.

My personal advice would be this... *Always* make backups, regardless of the type of hard disks you're using, and regardless of whether they're used as standalone disks or in RAID arrays. Use SCSI disks for systems that require a standalone disk - e.g. because you can't afford two SCSI disks - in a mission-critical environment - with the word "mission-critical" in a very subjective context.

If you would rather use IDE disks - be it PATA or SATA - then at least get two of them and put them in a RAID 1 array. Less storage percentage is lost and a more comfortable handling of risks is achieved with higher RAID levels, e.g. RAID 5 or RAID 10.

IDE disks are cheap these days, dirt cheap. Buy at least two disks at the time and put them in a RAID set-up - note: RAID 0 does *not* offer redundancy and even increases the risk of dataloss by another 100%! - and put the IDE disks in removable trays. They tend to break down quite soon when under heavy load, and this way, it'll be easier to replace them.

If an IDE hard disk in a RAID array breaks down, replace the faulty disk, rebuild the array and then replace the other disk. If one of them goes, the second one won't be far behind anyway. You can run the array in degraded mode for a day or two when unable to go to the shop to buy new disks.

Most people find SCSI far too expensive. So plainly and simply, buy IDE disks and use RAID. They're dirt-cheap these days, so best is to make use of it while you can...

Just my two cents... ;-)

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (registered GNU-Linux user #223157)