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Drives die. Period. It's a fact of life. Treat them like the shady little villains that they are and you'll be fine. Trust them with your data, without redundancy _and_ a backup strategey and they will bite you in the arse and take all your cookies. This much I can promise. "I've never had a drive die on me!" is an incomplete sentence. Add "yet." and you'll be getting somewhere.
A stinkpad in the house just lost a 20GB 2.5" drive today, almost 1 month after warranty. No real data loss as the OS is tarballed on the server, along with the user's data.
Starting last December we will only buy drives with a 3 year warranty. I've had a few go down in under a year and some that go after. Right now our oldest ATA drive running on a prodcution box is a 3 year old Fujitsu 10Gb surprisingly hasn't died. It was purchased in a lot of 6 drives, two went down in different machines on different sites within a week of each other when they were about 4 months old. Only a 1-year warranty on those puppies. This drive is the sole survivor and my guess is that if it has lasted us this long I'd imagine it's good for another 3 years. But I aint banking on it. It's mirrored and ready to be tossed the minute it even _looks_ at my cookie tray.
If data or uptime is even remotely critical then yes you should be looking into SCSI, but be prepared to pay the price. You could also look into ATA RAID - we use it for all of our servers as well as backing up offsite.
As for solid-state drives - yeah I guess there will be a day when I'm busy shuffling my money between offshore bank accounts and sure the yacht can handle most rough water and I'll be buying some of those when that happens. But we need lots of gigs of storage here and even SCSI is out of range for our budget. True they have stupid fast seek times (since they don't have to wait for a spinning platter), but the transfer rate will max out at the PCI bus.
If we're going to start a brand-name war over ATA drives I'd like to point out that there aren't any manufacturers crowing about having the best _real life_ low failure rates. They've all made some dogs in the past and will do so in the future.
What kind of drive cooler were you using? Was it one of those ones that screw into the bottom of the drive? Wouldn't bother. Make sure you have ample ventilation through your entire case. A good fresh breeze blowing over your drives (especially if you have a stack of drives) is your best defence. The drive platters are entombed into a heavy casket of solid aluminum on the sides and a thin chunk of steel on the top - mount the drives with all four screws firmly into your chassis. Better quality cases will have heavier gauge steel components. This provides an another vector for you to bleed off that demon heat energy. Fans are your friend. Get the ones that plug into your motherboard so you can monitor them. Make sure you have good air transfer throughout the case. I have also had the sad experience of losing a 60gb Quantum/Maxtor due to heat. I returned it under warranty and kept my mouth shut, and they gave me another. Glad I could share that dirty little secret with you, but don't take the chance. Be cool.
*** edit *** Man, I must have tied into finegan's coffee stash. I never have this much to say.
Last edited by mcleodnine; 03-26-2003 at 02:51 AM.
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