[mythtvnz] HDD Load Cycle Count ticking over too fast

[Stephen Worthington]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2012 17:46:57 +1200, you wrote:

>On 26/06/2012, at 5:20 PM, Steve Hodge wrote:
>
>> The 7200.11 series definitely has problems, but it seems to be a matter of luck. The main reason I've stuck with Seagate is their longer warranties.
>
>The current equivalent Seagate now has a 1yr warranty which seems pretty crappy to me. If you want the longer warranty you need to look for XT (seems to be a dropped product line) or the Constellation or ES series.

Yes, those are the "business class" drives.  But if a drive has a 1
year warranty, that does not mean it is allowed to fail after just 1
year.  If it does, then the CGA applies.  I personally expect *any*
hard drive to last at least 5 years.

>In the last 12 months I've had 2 WD's start to fail or totally die (3.2 & 3.5 yrs old) and 4 Seagates (1.5, 1.75 2.5, & 2.9yrs). I do have more Seagates in general so this isn't a bash Seagate email.
>
>I've just suffered a very sick 7200.12 that semi drops off the SATA bus when you try to write to it (shows as unrecognised via SMART, and then causes my machine to slow down then lockup when pending writes get too large), but it was healthy enough for reading so I've managed to copy off 460GB of unwatched recordings. 
>
>It's about to be replaced with a WD Caviar Black which still come with 5yr warranties, which I expect will be called upon with the way drive reliability seems to be going.
>
> - Wade

I bought four WD2001FASS 2 Tbyte Black drives within a couple of
months of each other.  Three have failed (two very quickly) and been
replaced by WD2002FAEX (SATA 6 Mb/s) drives.  The replacements have
had no problems, and seem to be identical except for the faster SATA
interface.  The other specs are identical.  The remaining WD2001FASS
is showing no signs of trouble despite it being the drive with the
massive load/unload cycle count.  It says its power on time is 712
days now.

I have one Samsung 1 Tbyte drive that has never given a hint of a
problem.  It ran 24/7 in the MythTV box for a long time, then got
retired, and is now my reserve spare.

I have two Hitachi 3 Tbyte drives that also have never given any
problems.  The oldest of the Hitachi drives is only 16 months old, so
it may be a bit early to be sure of their reliability yet.  They are
running 24/7 in the MythTV box, and have 3 year warranties.

I suspect that now that Hitachi have been bought out by WD, their
quality will go downhill somewhat, but I think the current generation
of fast 3 Tbyte drives are likely to be very good, and I am hoping
that the 4 Tbyte ones coming on-stream now will be the same.  Samsung
have been bought out too, by Seagate, so they will probably go
downhill fast.