On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 08:21 -0500, Reuben D. Budiardja wrote: > > So my questions having said all that, is there any thing else other than a > real hard-drive problem that would cause something like this ? > In other words, could the problem be in the controller, motherboard, etc other > than the hard drive itself that would cause hard-drives to fail like that ? > Or is it just Maxtor makes bad drives ? > Or is a consumer level hard-drive just cannot be used for this kind of work > > I am hoping for comments, etc. Thank you in advance. Have you monitored the temperature of the system at all times? Heat can play a major roll in causing drives and other hardware to fail long before it should. Good air flow around the system/drives is critical. And make sure you have a good UPS system connected. Power fluctuations can cause all kinds of havoc. Also note that using RAID by itself does not replace the need for backups. RAID protects against hardware failure. And depending on the value of the data it is usually recommended to run RAID with a hot spare drive so multiple drive failures won't bring the system down. I am not sure if the card you are using allows you to run a hot spare or not. And make sure you have something in place that notifies you that there is a problem. I would not categorically state that Maxtor makes bad drives. Manufacturers from time to time seem to kick out some bad drives. I have been running four 300GB Maxtor drives using LVM for over a year now continuously with no problem. But I could have one or more fail next week. As always YMMV.
