[ale] WAS RE: suddenly finding computer 'seized-up', NOW RAID with SATA Drives

[Dan Lambert]

I've had similar experiences with several manufacturers drives in the past,
Having to return drives to Seagate, Maxtor, and WD for RMS during warranty,
and having to jump through all kinds of hoops to get them replaced. Dealing
with WD was the least painful, but I still had to be without the drives
during that process.

The only ones that I can honestly say that I have NEVER had a problem with
were Hitachi drives I've owned. I have had (so far) very similar luck with
some Samsung drives that I purchased about 2 years ago. So far, they are
100% reliable.

In December of last year, I had a WD 320GB SATA drive that arrived DOA and
had to be RMA'ed. Fortunately, it was a drive I had purchased in a bundle of
parts to build 6 computers, and I had time to deal with the RMA process
before I had to deliver the computers.

This brings up something that I've been thinking about, and that is that due
to the densities (as you mentioned), we seem to be getting less reliable
drives in the long term, which makes me have to consider going to a higher
level RAID just for my own desktop and personal use. I'm no super geek, but
I have a fair amount of experience in building, repairing, and managing PCs.
I guess that's what really got me interested in LINUX to begin with. I
couldn't get a high reliability OS from MickeyStinks.

At any rate, I have been experimenting with several flavors of Linux over
the last couple of years, and have gotten fairly comfortable with Debian
based offerings for desktop use. I have had good experiences with using the
Ubuntu distro, and currently have one desktop running Ubuntu, and one
running Kubuntu. I'm still using Centos 4.X on my server, and will most
likely stay with that unless something comes along that just blows my socks
off.

In current Linux distros, particularly the Debian based ones, has anyone
done any experimenting with implementing a RAID 5 using SATA drives and an
onboard RAID controller from NVIDIA? All of my current desktop boxes have
AMD 64 processors, and each of the motherboards has an on board NVIDIA RAID
controller which can be setup as a RAID 0 or 1. What I'm wondering is if
there is any implementation that could be used to create a software RAID 5,
or would one have to purchase a SATA RAID controller card to do this? If
this is the case, can anyone recommend a RAID controller that would be a)
reliable, and b) inexpensive enough to use in a desktop computer. 

Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Pat
To: ale at ale.org
Regan
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2006 10:19 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] suddenly finding computer 'seized-up'....ATTN:DowHurst-2

Dan Lambert wrote:
> I've been using WD drives almost exclusively for a while now.
> 
> It's really weird, but I've never owned a Seagate drive that lived 
> linger than about 6 months. I won't waste my money on them anymore. I 
> used to buy a lot of Maxtor drives, but now Seagate has bought them. I 
> doubt I'll buy any more Maxtors.

Everyone has a different manufacturer that they love to hate :).  I have
only (personally) owned 1 Maxtor drive in the last 5+ years.  I suppose that
means I have a 100% failure rate on their drives :p.  The Maxtor drive is
only a 1 year warranty drive, it is now out of warranty.

The last 6 drives in my primary desktop have been Western Digital, all with
3 year warranties.  The pair that are in there now are 160s (the Maxtor
drive that I am afraid of is in there too, and is a 160).  One of those two
drives failed in the first 6 months.  All 3 have been fine ever since.

Before these 2 WD drives, I had 4 40 GB 7200 RPM WD drives.  They all lasted
until about 2-3 months before the 3 year warranty was up, then 3 started
giving out within weeks of each other.  I bought that Maxtor 160 as
temporary storage until I could RMA the 40s.

The RMAed 40s died within 6 months.  I hear Seagate has a 5 year warranty
now.  I don't think I care, because I don't want to run 3+ year old refurb
drives after that experience :).

If anyone is still interested in my primary desktop machine's history...
 Before the WD drives I had a pair of wonderful 13 GB 7200 RPM IBM drives.
IBM made awesome drives before the infamous DeathStar drives.
I gave those away to a friend of mine, who already had a pair that matched.
I know he got quite a bit of life out of them.

I think it is the platter densities that are killing us :(.  At least drives
are cheap and RAID is cheap, though.

Pat