Lone Coder: Bad Docs or Adventures in Linux RAID-land

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 03:38:05PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> | From: Ken Burtch <ken-8VyUGRzHQ8IsA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org>
> 
> | Those interested in my RAID sufferings can view my latest column at
> | 
> | http://www.pegasoft.ca/coder/coder_march_2009.html
> 
> You mention a pair of 1.5T drives.  I would guess that they are
> Seagates since until recently that was the only brand of 1.5T drives
> (I think).
> 
> The Seagate 1.5T disk drives (in fact all 7200.11 seagate drives) seem
> to be having problems that have got many owners picking up pitch forks
> and torches.
> 
> One of the symptoms that is recurring is that drives drop out of RAID
> arrays causing them to be rebuilt.  A reboot seems to fix the drives.
> 
> I've been pushing for more useful problem reports but have not
> succeeded.
> 
> The grand-daddy of thread on this is at
>   http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=9060
> Unfortunately many things are mixed together in this thread.
> 
> One of the odd things about the Seagate forum is that Seagare techs
> never post there.  There are Seagate admins who know nothing and admit
> it and there are users.

Yeah pauses for a short while and other issues certainly sound a lot
like the reported problems with the seagate drives.  I am sure happy I
don't own any seagate drives (from the last decade at least).  I took
them off my list when their first SATA drives had errors that made them
incompatible with some SATA contrrollers because seagate misunderstood
some part of the spec that everyone else got right.  Seems like firmware
has been hard for them to get right for a long time.

> BTW, RAID is not a good solution to the backup problem.  Too many disk
> threats are correlated when the drives are spinning in the same box
> and run off the same OS/controller/power-supply.  Think of fire,
> lightning, flood, or theft.  Oh, and ordinary file deletion, probably
> the most common problem.

Yeah, raid is to protect against drive failures.  Backups are to protect
against everything else.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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