Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive noise

Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 7:49 PM, Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote:
> >
> > I also found this after the reply from Ian.
> >
> > https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/
> >
> > No wonder they had it on sale.  Heck, why didn't they just say it was a
> > good door stop instead of a hard drive???
> >
>
> Yeah, the only reason I'd want to use that model drive is if I had a
> raid5 composed of entirely different drives and for some reason the
> discount on the Seagate 3TB drive let me bump it up to a raid6 (and to
> be sure I'd never put more than one of those in an array).  It is
> basically a doorstop.
>
> I had two of those go in the span of a year.  One was replaced under
> warranty.  The next was the warranty replacement.  That one was no
> longer under warranty, but after a scathing Amazon review Seagate
> actually commented on the review asking me to contact them about a
> replacement.  I didn't bother - I really was tired of swapping out
> drives at that pace and didn't consider the considerably-higher risk
> of a double failure worth it.
>
> i'd have to check - I think I picked a 4TB Seagate NAS drive to replace it.
>
> Somebody suggested not buying Seagate.  The thing is, EVERY
> manufacturer has had drives like these.  Well, the Hitachi drives
> Backblaze goes on about would be an exception, but they're
> SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive and I don't think it is worth the premium
> in a RAID.  For a single-drive system I'd strongly consider them.  I
> think I heard they were bought out at some point, so we'll see if
> their reputation holds.
>
> And that's the thing with brand reputations.  These days MBAs milk
> reputations.  Some finance guy realizes that people will buy this
> year's drives based on last year's reputation and cuts some corners
> and collects a huge bonus.  Three years later everybody is dealing
> with drive failures.  Every vendor does it.  That one Seagate model
> was about the worst I've personally seen, but who knows what model is
> being sold today that in three years will turn out to be just as bad,
> and it could come from any of the vendors.
>
> I do try to look at the Backblaze stats for what they're worth, but I
> think the general advice applies well.  Make sure you have an
> appropriate level of redundancy and backup strategy.  Make sure to mix
> models of drives in your RAIDs.  The whole point of a RAID is to keep
> the price down by increasing your tolerance of failures.
>
> And the whole NAS drive firmware thing really bugs me because they
> charge a premium for a few bits in flash memory that should be
> user-configurable anyway.  Some of those drives have better vibration
> resistance, which bugs me less.  However, the bottom line is that they
> probably will improve your RAID performance in the event of a failure,
> and they probably do tend to cut the corners less on them.  But who
> knows, maybe the drive that fails next year will be the super-premium
> edition.
>
> All of this goes to one of my drivers for using btrfs (and in this
> regard zfs will do just as well).  The checksumming means that I'm not
> really trusting the drive or its firmware at all, and I scrub my
> arrays weekly.
>
> Sorry you ended up with a bad drive...  That model IS considerably
> cheaper than most of the others...

I was never able to get either zfs or btrfs to work correctly, zfs was
very vulnerable -- I forgot to export a zfs on a usb drive and got an
enless loop of processes untill I rebooted.  Btrfs never did work for
me, I created a pool,  copied my root file system, usr and var into
ssubvolumes, and copied my files, but when I would boot into it,
everything was messed up, processes thought files were missing, very
strange.  So, how did you set up either one of those -- I would love to
use it because I have ssds and I don't want to rely on their firmware
either.


-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici
         covici@××××××××××.com