Hard drives, quality (IDE vs SCSI call for True Stories)

[Charles Steinkuehler]

david nicol wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-01-17 at 11:20, Aaron wrote:
> 
>> As far as stability they'll be about the same.  However, if this is a
>> mission critical application, as you say stability is most important, you
>> should look into a SCSI solution and stay away from IDE RAID.
>> 
>> Aaron
> 
> Is this still true?  Do IDE drivers still lock up?  Do IDE interfaces
> still burn out? What goes wrong with IDE anymore?  Does anyone have
> any recent personal experience of IDE failure?

I just had a 60 Gig IBM IDE drive bite the dust.  Much less than a year 
old (maybe 6-8 months...I'd have to check reciepts), and currently being 
processed by the new IBM/Hitachi Drive spin-off RMA folks.

Fortunately, the drive was mirrored (which saddly requires installing 
Win 2K Server if not running linux, which this box was not...I guess 
data integrity doesn't matter for "workstations" <sigh>).  The sad part 
is I had to re-task a new 80 Gig drive for the second mirror drive, 
which means I can't install RH-8 on my new wizz-bang system, since I 
only have one free 80G HDD, and I want to install to mirrrored 
partitions (yes, I could do this to a broken mirror on a single drive, 
or setup mirroring after install, but having done both of these, I can 
honestly say I just don't have the time to deal with it right now...I'm 
hoping the new IBM/Hitachi folks are as prompt with drive RMA's as the 
old IBM).

I also recently had two IBM SCSI drives die, but both were 4.5 Gig 
drives of 1994/5 vintage, so no big suprise there.  Both drives were 
part of a RAID-5 array, but the operator (not me :) didn't notice one of 
the drives had died until another one went and all the data was lost 
(there were spares on the shelf next to the machine).

More recent 18 & 36 Gig U160/10K units are humming along fine, most with 
years of service already provided.

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net