[ale] SATA Hard Drive Issues?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 01/27/2010 09:29 AM, gene.poole at macys.com wrote:
> Is it me or has anyone else experienced the lack of longevity of SATA
> drives? Over the past 6-months I've lost a Western Digital 320 GB Caviar,
> Seagate 500 GB Barracuda, and 2 Seagate 1 TB Barracuda (a 7200.11 and
> 7200.12) drives.
>
> I'm now running my main machine on a Hitachi 1 TB SATA II drive with my
> fingers crossed.

I've found hard disks generally to be hit or miss.  On systems where I 
cannot tolerate a total failure, I use a RAID array of two identical 
drives, though if the data is really important I've been known to put 
three identical drives in the system.

Of course, I have *one* server that, at the moment, does not have any 
redundant storage.  That is something I need to fix.  And the price of 
blu-ray media needs to come down so that I can use it for backups 
without breaking the bank...

I am reminded of a story someone told me once, where they got a new job 
in a position where the programs were done with punch cards, filing 
cabinets full of them, because the person that had the position before 
simply did not trust magnetic disks.  I couldn't advocate filling up 
stacks of paper with programs for that reason, but I certainly know 
better than to ever run with a single copy of anything around that's 
important... because *I* don't trust magnetic disks.  :-)

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                    Blog: http://mike.trausch.us/blog/
Tel: (404) 592-5746 x1                            Email: mike at trausch.us