Stored hard drive failure?

Sandy Rutherford sandy at krvarr.bc.ca
Wed Oct 5 01:01:24 PDT 2005


>>>>> On Wed, 5 Oct 2005 00:44:36 -0700, 
>>>>> "K Anderson" <freebsduser at comcast.net> said:

 > Not sure how long I'm storing them (See above question where I asked -- How 
 > long can the HD sit on the shelf... and  the other questions seemed to be 
 > editted out). But you're right the info could become out-of-date unless when 
 > I did patch management then I would pull the stored HD off the shelf and 
 > hope that it didn't fail because of non-use and re-mirror the main drive 
 > then stored the secondary back on the shelf. But then that really doens't 
 > hit the other two questions that were editted out.

 > Perhaps if somebody had experience with doing the very scenario I thought 
 > of. I know HDs can be touchy but how touchy can they get if they are just 
 > sitting on the shelf waiting for resuse and me going, darn that HD is bad 
 > now that it sat on the shelf for X number of [days|weeks|months|years].

See the thread:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=642921+0+/usr/local/www/db/text/2005/freebsd-questions/20050911.freebsd-questions

I have definitely noticed a higher failure rate among drives that have
been stored for a number of months.  I can't give you any hard
numbers, nor should you really believe them even if I did, because this
depends on age of the drive, model, design, etc.

If you are serious about data redundancy, why not simply set up RAID 1
volumes?  They will provide much better redundancy, at a minimal extra
cost, and with less work required on your part to maintain the
mirrors.

Sandy


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