[plug] RAID, and what it can't solve

[Craig Ringer]

> On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 07:16:27 +0800, William Kenworthy
> <billk at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> 
>>The bit I have picked up on is "Western Digital" and two disks failing.
>>Any idea of the cause of failure (and is there a question mark over
>>these disks as to reliability?)  I am thinking of getting some new,
>>bigger disks ...

Well, this is the second time I've had major problems with WD disks. On 
the other hand, I know they're commonly used by PC builders etc, and 
those people _really_ don't like warranty returns.

I won't be buying them again, but it's quite likely that my issues were 
just bad luck. I now _know_ that the first set I had die (120GB PATA 
JBs, quite some time ago) were a faulty batch from the factory. I 
wouldn't be surprised if this latest batch was the same. The two disks I 
had die had uncorrectable bad sectors in almost identical locations, and 
were manufactured within a few hundred disks of each other - suspicious.

Senectus wrote:
> Personally (and professionally) I've found seagate to be damn good
> quality and reliable.

I had great results with my 3x120GB Seagate SATA RAID 5 array (recently 
retired) and I'm still using the 2x80GB Seagate SATA RAID 1 array.

They're also quiet and use a little less power, which is really nice. 
I've also had good results with Maxtor disks (they have amazingly 
detailed SMART reporting, which is really nice).

--
Craig Ringer