On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 08:21 -0500, Reuben D. Budiardja wrote: > Hello, > First, I apologize if this is rather OT. > > I had multiple hard-drives failure yesterday on a RAID 5 array. Two out of > three drives died almost at the same time, rendering the RAID array useless. > I tried to recover by doing --assembly and even --assembly --force but it > failed. The raid device /dev/md0 run with damaged fail system after that, and > fsck would not fixed it, and message scrolled on the screen and log files > indicating that writing to the two drives were really failed. SMART reported > the same thing. So I lost all data. > > There is a very very small probabilities that something like this can happen. > However, in the last two years, I've had a strings of bad luck with these > hard drives: all Maxtor DiamondMax 250 GB IDE HD. In the last two years, I > had 4 drives failure with these drives (including the ones yesterday). The > two failures in the past, I had a replacement drives sent for both of them > since they were under warranty and it indicated a fail drive with Maxtor's > diagnostic software. > > I am using these consumer level drives thinking that I could build a rather > cheap backup system. The machine, running RAID 5, did backup for some > machines in the network using rsnapshot, twice a day. The size of data being > backed-up is about 250~300GB. The hard drives is on a Promise controller > running software RAID 5 > > 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. > I have always loved my maxtor drives and they work for a long time. That being said, the 200gb diamondmax that came out in the last year or so gave me 3 failures in < 5 months (I bought one and they warranteed it 3 times). I suspect that they may have had a glitch in manufacturing that resulted in a bad batch, although the 3 that failed for me were made in 2 different locations I would venture to guess that you bought the drives in your raid array at the same time and they may have been part of the same batch. A defect that affects one may have been shared on others from the same plant at the same time, so it is quite possible that that can happen. I have no problems using what you call "consumer level" drives for anything I do. > RDB > -- > Reuben D. Budiardja > Dept. Physics and Astronomy > University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN >
