Softraid Multi-dirve Failure

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2009-01-09 at 15:10 -0700, Joe Fleming wrote:
> Yeah, I know heat is usually the main killer. I have a couple fans
> mounted in front of the drives and they run really cool (though I've
> read that running too cool can also kill them..... and there's the
> whole dust argument too, but they stay pretty clean). I'd run a true
> RAID card, but I've always had good luck with software RAID in the
> past so I figured I'd just let it roll. I already had a drive to use
> as a replacement I bought when I replaced another failed drive in the
> same array (that was one of the 5 in the last year). I know from the
> noises that 1 of the drives was going to fail (hence the backing up),
> I just didn't expect 2 to fail.... and at EXACTLY the same time.
> 
> The thing that annoys me is that these drives are barely a year old,
> I've already had 1 failure and now I have at least 1 more if not 2.
> Sure these aren't enterprise drives, but I used to be able to run
> consumer drives for years before I had any problems (still have some
> old 80GB drives around that are still chugging along without problem).
> Why do all of these new drives fail so far ahead of their warranty
> time?!
----
because they are always finding new ways to make them cheaper.

I once had 2 hard drives fail simultaneously in a Dell PERC 3/Di RAID 5
array but I think the RAID controller was confused and failed 1 drive
completely and kept the actual failed drive online. I suspected that the
drive that was off-lined probably didn't have any problems at all. Dell
replaced both drives without question and I simply updated the firmware
on the controller and set up the RAID arrays all over again (backups are
always your friend).

I long ago stopped using consumer grade anything for servers since the
server grade hardware is cheap enough and I feel that I can adequately
lay the blame for failure at someone else's feet.

Craig