Yeah, I know heat is usually the main killer. I have a couple fans mounted in front of the drives and they run really cool (though I've read that running too cool can also kill them..... and there's the whole dust argument too, but they stay pretty clean). I'd run a true RAID card, but I've always had good luck with software RAID in the past so I figured I'd just let it roll. I already had a drive to use as a replacement I bought when I replaced another failed drive in the same array (that was one of the 5 in the last year). I know from the noises that 1 of the drives was going to fail (hence the backing up), I just didn't expect 2 to fail.... and at EXACTLY the same time.

The thing that annoys me is that these drives are barely a year old, I've already had 1 failure and now I have at least 1 more if not 2. Sure these aren't enterprise drives, but I used to be able to run consumer drives for years before I had any problems (still have some old 80GB drives around that are still chugging along without problem). Why do all of these new drives fail so far ahead of their warranty time?!

-Joe

Lisa Kachold wrote:
HEAT is the most devastating culprit to drives, other than extensive read/writes, and power sparks, as Eric suggested below.

I suggest you order a nice controller card.  3Ware.com has cheap ones.  You can even do terabyte RAID for say a nice GreenPlum cluster in an old AmericanMicro.com 4 U server with 8 drives!

LVM over hardware RAID is a fine solution, especially with good conditioning and temperature protections.

You just pop out the drive (RAID 1+0 [disk is cheap]) and replace and rebuild hot.

www.Obnosis.comhttp://wiki.obnosis.com | http://hackfest.obnosis.com (503)754-4452

January PLUG HackFest = Kristy Westphal, AZ Department of Economic Security Forensics @ UAT 1/10/09 12-3PM

Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2009 14:30:27 -0700
From: eric.c...@gmail.com
To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
Subject: Re: Softraid Multi-dirve Failure

This is more in regards to your last paragraph. Where are you storing your hard drives? What type of environment are they subjected to?

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 2:25 PM, Joe Fleming <j...@selectitaly.com> wrote:
Hey all, I have a Debian box that was acting as a 4 drive RAID-5 mdadm softraid server. I heard one of the drives making strange noises but mdstat reported no problems with any of the drives. I decided to copy the data off the array so I had a backup before I tried to figure out which drive it was. Unfortunately, in the middle of copying said data, 2 of the drives dropped out at the same time. Since RAID-5 is only tolerant to one failure at a time, basically the whole array is hosed now. I've had drives drop out on me before, but never 2 at once. Sigh.

I tried to Google a little about dealing with multi-drive failures with mdadm, but I couldn't find much in my initial looking. I'm going to keep digging, but I thought I'd post a question to the group and see what happens. So, is there a way to tell mdadm to "unmark" one of the 2 drives as failed and try to bring up the array again WITHOUT rebuilding it? I really don't think both of the drives failed on me simultaneously and I'd like to try to return 1 of the 2 to the array and test my theory. If I can get the array back up, I can either keep trying to copy data off it or add a new replacement and try to rebuild. I'm pretty novice with mdadm thought I don't see an option that will let me do what I want. Can anyone offer me some advice or point me in the right direction..... or am I just SOL?

As a side note, why can't hard drive manufacturers make drives that last anymore? I've had like 5 drives fail on me in the last year... WD, Seagate, Hitachi, they all suck equally! I can't find any that last for any reasonable amount of time, and all the warranties leave you with reman'd drives which fail even more rapidly, some even show up DOA. Plus, I'm not sending my unencrypted data off to some random place! Sorry for venting, just a little ticked off at all of this. Thanks in advance for any help.

-Joe

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