On 20/08/2019 11:35, T i m wrote:
On 18 Aug 2019 14:16:40 GMT, Bob Eager wrote:

On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 14:32:28 +0100, T i m wrote:

The second failure was a WD Red, obviously something wrong because of
the quick failure. Some of my early drives are still in there, and they
are WD Blue, but most are now Red ones.

It will be interesting to hear how they fair over time.

Some are up top over 50,000 hours (the Red ones).

Any idea what the MTBF is on those drives Bob?

Sure. Do I remember correctly that some drives / controllers could
actually ensure all spindles in an array were kept in sync?

I would imagine so, as some RAID requires that (I think).

Yeah. When I was playing with it in my CNI / Netware 3.x days I think
there was a flying lead you had to join somewhere to make that happen.
Like WOL sometimes need a flying cable.

Also running one Windows machine with a mirrored pair - using the
standard Windows mirroring.

Ok. OOI, how many have ever failed in use and how well did they handle
the failure (did they just 'carry on as hoped / expected')?

Two. Carried on as they should and emailed me the details.

Excellent. ;-)

How do you back that lot up or are some backups of the others?

Some back up others (on different floors of the house). Some to DVD
(using heavy ECC, see below). Important stuff goes offsite in storage (10
miles away) and also on http://tarsnap.com

Sounds like you have most eventualities covered Bob (depending the
height above sea level of all locations and their hardness against an
EMP). ;-)

DVD ECC is via dvdisaster. I did a test; wrote a DVD with ECC then used a
Swiss Army knife to make random cuts and scrapes (took enough away that
you could see through it). It was recovered perfectly.

Wow, that sounds like the old 'Tomorrows World' demo of optical media
with jam or something. ;-)

I have a BDRW in a couple of machines and I wondered if the media was
any less reliable long term than say DVDR's? 50GB is quite a bit more
than even 9GB.

If money was no object, I would love to fill the TeraStation I was
given with (4x) WD RED 2TB (maximum size allowed) drives and have 6TB
available with a single drive fault tolerance.[1]

The only other thing is I would then need to back up 6TB ... (easy if
money was no object of course). ;-)

The 'problem' with that particular solution is that it was pulling
over 40W when running (with 4 x Seagate's, Red's might have been lower
power) and 17W when idle (and was still quite warm when sleeping).

Cheers, T i m

[1] Mate says he has another (empty) TeraStation somewhere that I
could have and I might feel happier actually using such ITRW, knowing
I had some spare hardware to fall back on once I had committed to the
drives.




I don't run NAS drives in my synology boxes.
They don't spin continuously so I use desktop drives and they are fine.
WD green in the one.
I forget what's in the other.

I did have an early fail on one drive but they replaced it with a bigger
one under warranty without any hassle.