Ask Slashdot: Do You Test Your New Hard Drives? 348
An anonymous reader writes "Any Slashdot thread about drive failure is loaded with good advice about EOL — but what about the beginning? Do you normally test your new purchases as thoroughly as you test old, suspect drives? Has your testing followed the proverbial 'bathtub' curve of a lot of early failures, but with those that survive the first month surviving for years? And have you had any return problems with new failed drives, because you re-partitioned it, or 'ran Linux,' or used stress-test apps?"
Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SSDs (Score:5, Insightful)
> Who cares about HDDs anymore these days?
Anyone with a need for a massive amount of storage space.
Re:SSDs (Score:0, Insightful)
The massive storage requirements cause massive backup time, making a RAID setup of some kind necessary. At which point a dying disk now and then no longer is an issue.
Re:SSDs (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really. People usually don't modify gigantic footprints of data per day, so standard incremental backup strategies are still very applicable. Most of the large data tends to be read-only over time, typically media, archives, large installation files, etc.
Re:Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
Add to the above:
HDD tools are useless. I recently tried a bunch of them - they all reported my HDD in perfect condition... while it was doing the click of death. HDD failed within a week.
Re:SSDs (Score:4, Insightful)
Rebuild time. It takes our hardware raids about 24 hours to rebuild, and software raids about 72 hours. If the disk failure isn't detected immediately, even with RAID-6 you are pushing your luck.
RAID is not backup.
Re:SSDs (Score:4, Insightful)
Depending on your definition of reliable and long term, people still use tapes.
Wrong Approach (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been dealing with hardware failures for 20+ years. What I've learned is that disasters WILL happen, regardless of what preventive measures are in place. So I shifted my focus toward recoverablity. To me, the important question is "When something catastrophic happens, how quickly and easily can I put things back in working order"?
Since I use RAID where appropriate, and more importantly, I am positively fanatic about frequent, full, and tested backups, the only concern I have when a hard drive dies is whether I'm still entitled to a warranty replacement.
Re:Heh (Score:0, Insightful)
It had it's purpose in its day.
Apostrophes are hard.