Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 7:49 PM, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > I also found this after the reply from Ian. > > > > https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/ > > > > No wonder they had it on sale. Heck, why didn't they just say it was a > > good door stop instead of a hard drive??? > > > > Yeah, the only reason I'd want to use that model drive is if I had a > raid5 composed of entirely different drives and for some reason the > discount on the Seagate 3TB drive let me bump it up to a raid6 (and to > be sure I'd never put more than one of those in an array). It is > basically a doorstop. > > I had two of those go in the span of a year. One was replaced under > warranty. The next was the warranty replacement. That one was no > longer under warranty, but after a scathing Amazon review Seagate > actually commented on the review asking me to contact them about a > replacement. I didn't bother - I really was tired of swapping out > drives at that pace and didn't consider the considerably-higher risk > of a double failure worth it. > > i'd have to check - I think I picked a 4TB Seagate NAS drive to replace it. > > Somebody suggested not buying Seagate. The thing is, EVERY > manufacturer has had drives like these. Well, the Hitachi drives > Backblaze goes on about would be an exception, but they're > SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive and I don't think it is worth the premium > in a RAID. For a single-drive system I'd strongly consider them. I > think I heard they were bought out at some point, so we'll see if > their reputation holds. > > And that's the thing with brand reputations. These days MBAs milk > reputations. Some finance guy realizes that people will buy this > year's drives based on last year's reputation and cuts some corners > and collects a huge bonus. Three years later everybody is dealing > with drive failures. Every vendor does it. That one Seagate model > was about the worst I've personally seen, but who knows what model is > being sold today that in three years will turn out to be just as bad, > and it could come from any of the vendors. > > I do try to look at the Backblaze stats for what they're worth, but I > think the general advice applies well. Make sure you have an > appropriate level of redundancy and backup strategy. Make sure to mix > models of drives in your RAIDs. The whole point of a RAID is to keep > the price down by increasing your tolerance of failures. > > And the whole NAS drive firmware thing really bugs me because they > charge a premium for a few bits in flash memory that should be > user-configurable anyway. Some of those drives have better vibration > resistance, which bugs me less. However, the bottom line is that they > probably will improve your RAID performance in the event of a failure, > and they probably do tend to cut the corners less on them. But who > knows, maybe the drive that fails next year will be the super-premium > edition. > > All of this goes to one of my drivers for using btrfs (and in this > regard zfs will do just as well). The checksumming means that I'm not > really trusting the drive or its firmware at all, and I scrub my > arrays weekly. > > Sorry you ended up with a bad drive... That model IS considerably > cheaper than most of the others...
I was never able to get either zfs or btrfs to work correctly, zfs was very vulnerable -- I forgot to export a zfs on a usb drive and got an enless loop of processes untill I rebooted. Btrfs never did work for me, I created a pool, copied my root file system, usr and var into ssubvolumes, and copied my files, but when I would boot into it, everything was messed up, processes thought files were missing, very strange. So, how did you set up either one of those -- I would love to use it because I have ssds and I don't want to rely on their firmware either. -- Your life is like a penny. You're going to lose it. The question is: How do you spend it? John Covici cov...@ccs.covici.com