Let me just restate for the record here: We had thousands of drive failures under my belt. We could trace the cause of the exact failure for virtually all drives. It was our job to understand what part would fail in every drive so that we could make sure that it wasn't ours.
In all of the testing that I have done cache had very little actual real life return as far as reliability of the drive. Drives with 2MB of cache or drives with a solid state read mirror where just as prone to failure. (This is from a sample size of a few thousand) What does kill drives: Temperature (Cold and Hot, check the recommended running temp for the drive) Power Supply (Cheap power supplies kill everything, invest here to save hardware later) Controller Card/Components (Believe it or not about half our failures could be traced to poor signals from the main board or controller card.) So do not super cool drives, and buy really good power supplies and motherboards. Intel/nVIDIA have good track records as far as chip sets go. Up until three years ago Via motherboards where total crap. I havn't worked on there new stuff but I have heard that it has gotten better. I still won't buy it though. On 10/31/05, Robert Denier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I didn't see this mentioned so I thought I'd add it. Hard drives come > with different amounts of cache ram. I believe 16MB is about the > largest out now. > > The point being that a larger cache may result in a bit less work for > the moving components which in turn may result in longer life. I'm not > sure this would matter in practice though. Still, if your getting a new > drive, I'd look for at least an 8MB cache for performance reasons if > nothing else.. > > Another thing worth considering, particularly if you use many of the > same drives is how much power they use. High power usage will make them > harder to keep cool and cost some more electric wise.. > > A final factor to consider is how much noise they make. I don't think > that has a direct relationship with reliability though since there are a > variety of physical components in a drive... > > -Robert > > > > > _______________________________________________ > mythtv-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users > > > _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
