On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 10:44 AM, Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam@whitemice.org> wrote:
On Wed, 2011-11-30 at 15:01 +0000, Dave Howorth wrote:
Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
I'm not sure about "longer life expectancy than your reg hard drive"; but in any case it doesn't matter. The best thing to do is always: have a spare. It doesn't matter what it is; it your concerned enough about it [because, I presume, you depend on it] to crawl around the Internet to verify your configuration Absolutely agree with all of this. .... buy two [and at only twice the price! But not with this little bit. At least with regular disks - I can't speak for SSDs. But buying two together increases your chances of them sharing a common batch fault and both failing at very near the same time. I generally try to buy from different manufacturers, or at different times.
False. They cannot fail at the "same time'; that isn't possible. You purchased the second as a *SPARE*. You don't use a *SPARE* until you need it [the first one fails]. Once you are using it then it isn't a spare. Maybe they will both fail after six months of use - but that is a year, not six months. And you have six months to buy your new spare after your first one failed.
Adam, A couple years ago I bought a bunch of drives at once (maybe 20?). As we were managing a large set of data we made 2 working copies and a backup copy on 3 different drives from that set. All 3 failed within 48 hours of each other. (don't ask me why). Fortunately it was a circuit board failure, so we swapped the electronics package from one of the drivew we hadn't used yet and were able to recover the data. The same also happened to people with raid arrays at that time. Suddenly the advice on the mdraid list was to mix and match manufacturers in an array to reduce the likelihood of simultaneous failure. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org