Stored hard drive failure?

K Anderson freebsduser at comcast.net
Wed Oct 5 01:10:17 PDT 2005


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sandy Rutherford" <sandy at krvarr.bc.ca>
To: <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
Cc: "K Anderson" <freebsduser at comcast.net>
Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2005 1:01 AM
Subject: Re: Stored hard drive failure?


>>>>>> 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 But you're right the info could become out-of-date unless 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

Sandy,

Thanks that's the thread I was looking for.
The reason I asked the question was to find out about powered down hard 
drives. Got a friend who does a scheme with a drive and leaves it powered 
down but I didn't want to sound like a loon when I asked him how often does 
he spin the drive up to test its integrity. Right about the RAID 1 thing 
though.

Thanks again Sandy.

~Mr. Anderson 




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