Drive arrangement

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 21st, 2010, 20:17

Weirdly, it stopped being mental again after about 30 minutes.

Post by **deject** » January 21st, 2010, 20:18

CIIJASIIE?

or poking it with sharpened sticks?

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » January 31st, 2010, 5:09

I ended up doing a launch and nuke last night.

Fortunately all the cables were still in place, so was about a 30 second swap.

I've not seen any of the problems from before yet, but that means little

Post by **FatherJack** » January 31st, 2010, 19:54

Every time there's a power cut, I "lose" a drive. Sod's Law decrees that it is always the largest one. It happened this week.

It's actually fine if it's switched on through brown-outs due to the awesomeness of the power supply, this always occurs when the PC is turned off (not at the switch) during the outage.

I'll get RAID failure popups (even on JBOD disks, still handled by the RAID controller) and long pauses of apparent inactivity. It's usually because the swap file, media player database or search index are on the afflicted drive.

I copy all the data across to new drives, format the old ones and everything's fine on all the disks. I have three one-terabyte disks from different manufacturers that I've replaced as "broken" which all seem to be fine now.

Until the next power cut.

I've always been a little suspicious of my on-board RAID controller after losing so many Raptors when I was striping them, so I'm even considering (gasp) software mirroring with Windows (urgh) dynamic disks. Which is a World of Shit, as partitioning tools can't fathom them.

cheeseandham · Post by **cheeseandham** » January 31st, 2010, 22:55

Fatherjack,

If that is happening with that alarming regularity I have three letters for you (and that you already know from a work perspective)

U.P.S.

Post by **FatherJack** » January 31st, 2010, 23:17

cheeseandham wrote:U.P.S.

Terrified of them. Had one in my office at work - a good one. One morning, or overnight, some of its internals burnt out. Came into my office filled with acrid smoke. If that had happened at home, where I was planning to relocate it, I'd likely be dead.

Could stretch to a mains felcher though, I guess.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » February 1st, 2010, 2:00

I hear they have these things called smoke alarms now

As far as the drives go, it sounds more like corruption than actual drive death.

I assume you've done the usual checkdisk stuff?

Post by **FatherJack** » February 2nd, 2010, 19:50

I think one drive may be more poorly than the others, Windows won't boot with it enabled, even with no drive letters active on it.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » February 2nd, 2010, 19:54

Tried drive maker's boot disk based tools?

Post by **FatherJack** » February 2nd, 2010, 20:09

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:Tried drive maker's boot disk based tools?

Not yet, only just made sure I have everything off it and worried why it keeps happening to different drives. It's a Samsung, so I can use the ESTool.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » May 17th, 2011, 2:10

I'm starting to think RAID 0 is a bad idea.

Had a weird crash the other day, had to do a hard reset, one of the drives in my OS array kicked up an error after, reset the error status in the hope it was just panicking, no such luck.

No1Jew · Post by **No1Jew** » May 17th, 2011, 3:39

If you're using Raid 0 just for the speed factor then there is another option if you have a few pennies spare in your bedside table !

Try one of these for your OS and then use you F3's for storage of other stufs

Post by **deject** » May 17th, 2011, 7:16

No1Jew wrote:If you're using Raid 0 just for the speed factor then there is another option if you have a few pennies spare in your bedside table !

Try one of these for your OS and then use you F3's for storage of other stufs

Or buy a regular SATA SSD like a normal person.

No1Jew · Post by **No1Jew** » May 17th, 2011, 11:21

OK, one of these then !!

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » May 17th, 2011, 12:00

If I had silly money to spend on slightly faster storage, I would, maybe.

Or just set up a raid 10 array with 8 1TB F3s. 4TB of save storage. fuck yes.

But I don't, so there

Post by **FatherJack** » May 17th, 2011, 12:43

I've given up on RAID0 - I might use it as a swap drive or other temporary storage, but outside of a server, there's not a lot of reason to compartmentalise drives that much.

Not only does it double the failure domain from the start, it also further decreases reliability. Small errors that would normally be recoverable from seem to bring down the array, and the chances of them surviving an unplanned power-down are worryingly slim.