HD Failures

[rochurch]

I am losing my second Western Digital hard drive in the last year. These are Green drives formatted with 64K sectors (even though I know we don't have to do that any longer, old habits are hard to break).
On the positive side they don't just completely fail, but I start getting corrupted recordings and the it is downhill from there.
Are there any utilities or suggestions? I tried putting one of them in the freezer for a while but that didn't make a difference.

[pjpjpjpj]

Sorry I don't have any suggestions, but do you mind if I ask how old they are? I am in the market for a new drive and was looking at the WD Caviar Greens, but now you have me thinking twice.

Of course, I'm probably going to wait until the artificially-high prices caused by the flooding overseas return back to where they previously were....

[will]

Why don't we need to format with 64k sectors any longer?

Also, I recommend staying away from WD Green Drives. I had 4 2tb drives in a RAID 5 and two of the drives failed while I was trying to expand the array. I received replacement drives from WD but I lost about 250+ DVD rips (that was a fun project to redo ).

I have had really good luck with the HITACHI Deskstar 7K3000. They actually work in arrays (hitachi doesn't install firmwares that affect RAIDs in order to push their "enterprise" drives). I was hoping to upgrade my 2tb Deskstars to 3tb drives but because of the high prices I plan to temporally use my WD Green Drives until hard drive prices come back to normal. However, I learned my lesson, no RAID 5s on WD Green Drives. These will be in either a RAID 6 or 10 so I can loose 2 drives and my data can still survive.

[rochurch]

The one that failed was just over a year old. The other drive failed last summer - again, just over a year old. I have another green 2TB drive that is still under warranty and it is still working well.
Most of the stuff on the 2TB that is failing can be read, so it is still in the system. I had Sage balancing new recording across the 2 storage drives (no raid). I changed it so that now it is only recording to the good drive.
I did the same thing last time and was able to transition without losing much of anything. Just watch or move the shows off the old drive and when it is either empty or duplicated to your good drive then take it out of service.
I can't remember where I saw the thing about not having to do 64k sectors, but I think it was in the Sage documentation. Maybe I just dreamed it up or got confused? Anyway, when I am introducing a new drive I have continued to do it that way.

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by will

Why don't we need to format with 64k sectors any longer?

That requirement was eliminated in Sage 7. It's in the original release statement.

[will]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

That requirement was eliminated in Sage 7. It's in the original release statement.

Ok. I would still recommend using 64k sectors for recording drives. Think about it...you are recording shows that are 3 to 10 GB. The larger the sector the better the random access time.

I never ran any tests myself but I did a lot of research and read reviews of tests of different sector sizes (4, 32, 64, 128) and at least with RAID arrays, 64 came out as the best.

[rochurch]

Yeah, even though it is not required it is probably a good idea. Right now is not a good time to be buying a new hard drive, so I am going to make do with what we have. I'm also going to start using the convert feature more often to compress stuff that may never get watched or we just want to hang on to it.
I read an article somewhere that said that HD prices should come back in line in about 6 months. I can wait that long.

[will]

Yep, a lot of people are predicting hard drive prices to fall back to what they were pre-October 2011 in about six months. We just have to wait it out...

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by will

Yep, a lot of people are predicting hard drive prices to fall back to what they were pre-October 2011 in about six months. We just have to wait it out...

I saw an article a week or two ago that said WD had their first factory back online since the floods but did not expect it to start catching up to inventory demands until at least March. Hopefully that's not just optimism and it's more like March instead of June...

Anyone had decent/respectable/fine experience with Seagate? Seems like I've only heard bad things (including some threads here in the past few years), but really you only hear about the problems, people rarely go out of their way to say it's "working fine, no problems". The only internal 1 TB drives I have seen for <$100 since the floods are by Hitachi and Seagate.