ATA Woes.

[Joe Koberg]

Jon Simola wrote:
> On 7/19/05, Tony Byrne <freebsd at byrnehq.com> wrote:
>>I'm totally confused. I don't know enough about SMART to know whether
>>I'm looking at real failing drives or some bug exposed by the
>>interaction between drive firmware, hd controller and FreeBSD.
> 
> 
> What I've recently learned the hard way is that desktop drives have no
> place in a server. I've now failed 4 of 10 SATA drives (Maxtor and WD)
> in 1U rackmounts, and am moving on to trying the WD Raptor SATA drives
> (which claim to be low-end server).
> 

I have to agree with this opinion,

I recently had a WD1600JD SATA fail within a couple months of
installation, and the warranty replacement failed within a week.
First drive failed autodetection and made servo
ticking noises.  Second drive had many bad sectors.

Add this to the pile of dead 3yr-old 40GB WD drives from
all the workstations around here.

I install SATA drives in duplicate and triplicate for this
reason. Preferably in removable bays with a fan.

I assume they're bad out of the box... I write them full of
zeros with DD, then read it all back, then do it again. If
I don't get read errors then I install them.



Joe Koberg
joe at osoft dot us