[Tfug] Hardware reliability

[Zack Williams]

> Oh, I've *seen* lots of dead drives but never *experienced*
> one, myself.  I attribute this to having many redundant
> backups  :-/  (i.e., if you have NO backup, you can rest
> assured ALL of your disks will die, etc.)

Just as a curiosity, what are you doing for backup?

I've got disk to disk, disk to disk to (removable) disk, and disk to
disk to tape running on a  few systems, plus using version control
like subversion or git to replicate data that is used on multiple
machines. Additionally, I've got ZFS snapshots on the opensolaris
machines I run.

> I've been tempted to pull apart some of the larger disks
> I've come across just to see what has failed on the controllers
> (e.g., those that don't spin up).  But, it doesn't make
> sense economically -- and I've far too little "free time"
> to satisfy that bit of curiosity.  :-/

Especially with a new 1TB drive costing around $100 these days.   I do
have a pile of older 80GB and 120GB IDE drives I've DBAN'ed and have
passed the manufacturer diagnostic in long mode to put in machines
that can't support LBA48.

At Macworld last January, I talked to the guys at DriveSavers, and
they said the order of failure on non-physically damaged drives was
pretty much:

 1. Component failure on the controller board
 2. Failure of the head solenoid
 3. Failure of the motor that spins the platter

Supposedly it's fairly common that they can take a good controller
board off a drive with the same firmware, hook it up and the drive
works like new.

- Zack