On Thursday 27 October 2005 20:27, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 11:30:07AM -0400, Steve Adeff wrote: > > noone has yet mentioned S.M.A.R.T. yet. After I went through a stint of > > loosing 2 hd's in a week's time (due to powersupply problems) I looked > > into things and found smartctl, which monitors the smart status of drives > > and can even be setup to email you when it encounters a problem. > > According to manufacturers warranty's upon a SMART pre-fail warning you > > are allowed to, if the drive is still under warranty, get a replacement. > > IMHO, SMART is like the sound from a rifle - if you're in > front of the bullet you'll never hear it. I've had three > SMART-enabled drives fail on me. In every case, the email > saying "a drive is dying" was just about the last thing > written to the drive before it went R/O, and none of them > lasted long enough to copy the contents off to another > drive. Since then I've switched to RAID5 so I'll get the > "array is degraded" message when there's actually time to > do something about it.
I've never had SMART not throw a flag early enough. Even when my powersupply was causing problems SMART knew something was wrong and is the only reason I was able to rescue one of the drives. I lost one because I kept running them not knowing what the problem was. > > > I suggest paying the extra shipping cost to receive the new drive so you > > can copy your data over. Keep an eye on the drive. I'll usually put it > > into a ro mount and if gets really bad I unplug power to it until I get a > > new drive. > > The drives that failed on me were two Maxtors and a Western > Digital. The Maxtors lasted long enough to be obsolete so > I just chucked them. The WD was only about 9 months old. > WD's RMA process allows you to give them a CC number and > they'll ship out the replacement by courier at no charge. > You then have 30 days to swap the drive and ship back the > defective one (at your expense) or else they charge the new > drive to your card. In my case, it was a 120Gb that failed > and they sent me a 160Gb replacement. All the same, when I > decided to switch to RAID5 I bought more Maxtor drives. If > they last long enough to make an RMA pointless then I'll be > happy. This is one nice thing about the RMA process, getting a larger drive! this has happened to me twice ;-) Steve _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users