Softraid Multi-dirve Failure

[Stephen]

if they were all ordered at the same time it could be a manfactureing
defect that was in the batch (i have seen it) or they all were jarred
at the same time.. in hsipping or what have you (have seen that as
well)

without a real forensic analyses of the drive it will be hard to tell.

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Joe Fleming <joe at selectitaly.com> 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?!
>
> -Joe
>
> Lisa Kachold wrote:
>
> HEAT is the most devastating culprit to drives, other than extensive
> read/writes, and power sparks, as Eric suggested below.
>
> I suggest you order a nice controller card.  3Ware.com has cheap ones.  You
> can even do terabyte RAID for say a nice GreenPlum cluster in an old
> AmericanMicro.com 4 U server with 8 drives!
>
> LVM over hardware RAID is a fine solution, especially with good conditioning
> and temperature protections.
>
> You just pop out the drive (RAID 1+0 [disk is cheap]) and replace and
> rebuild hot.
>
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> (503)754-4452
> ________________________________
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> Forensics @ UAT 1/10/09 12-3PM
> ________________________________
> Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2009 14:30:27 -0700
> From: eric.cope at gmail.com
> To: plug-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> Subject: Re: Softraid Multi-dirve Failure
>
> This is more in regards to your last paragraph. Where are you storing your
> hard drives? What type of environment are they subjected to?
>
> On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 2:25 PM, Joe Fleming <joe at selectitaly.com> wrote:
>
> Hey all, I have a Debian box that was acting as a 4 drive RAID-5 mdadm
> softraid server. I heard one of the drives making strange noises but mdstat
> reported no problems with any of the drives. I decided to copy the data off
> the array so I had a backup before I tried to figure out which drive it was.
> Unfortunately, in the middle of copying said data, 2 of the drives dropped
> out at the same time. Since RAID-5 is only tolerant to one failure at a
> time, basically the whole array is hosed now. I've had drives drop out on me
> before, but never 2 at once. Sigh.
>
> I tried to Google a little about dealing with multi-drive failures with
> mdadm, but I couldn't find much in my initial looking. I'm going to keep
> digging, but I thought I'd post a question to the group and see what
> happens. So, is there a way to tell mdadm to "unmark" one of the 2 drives as
> failed and try to bring up the array again WITHOUT rebuilding it? I really
> don't think both of the drives failed on me simultaneously and I'd like to
> try to return 1 of the 2 to the array and test my theory. If I can get the
> array back up, I can either keep trying to copy data off it or add a new
> replacement and try to rebuild. I'm pretty novice with mdadm thought I don't
> see an option that will let me do what I want. Can anyone offer me some
> advice or point me in the right direction..... or am I just SOL?
>
> As a side note, why can't hard drive manufacturers make drives that last
> anymore? I've had like 5 drives fail on me in the last year... WD, Seagate,
> Hitachi, they all suck equally! I can't find any that last for any
> reasonable amount of time, and all the warranties leave you with reman'd
> drives which fail even more rapidly, some even show up DOA. Plus, I'm not
> sending my unencrypted data off to some random place! Sorry for venting,
> just a little ticked off at all of this. Thanks in advance for any help.
>
> -Joe
>
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-- 
A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from
rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.

Stephen