[BBLISA] Notes on RAID recovery Re: Whatever happened to Seagate?

[Rich Braun]

Ned Harvey noted:
> It's interesting that drive reliability is on your radar, you
> perceive SSD as less reliable (despite how this conversation
> started with your HDD's dying in only 1 year), you're using
> md devices, and haven't gone to zfs yet... All of these are
> opposite me.

> I think you're being conservative, sticking with HDD's and
> old software raid, thinking that you're gaining reliability,
> but I think you're actually reducing both your reliability
> and performance as a result.

At work I haven't purchased or specified physical data center hardware since,
oh, 2010.  I built my home servers starting in 1992 and set up the current
software-RAID system around 2003 when a hardware RAID controller went obsolete
on me.

All your points above are well-taken, and if I were setting all this up from
scratch I'd be doing it with btrfs or ZFS.  The only time I have to pay
attention to this is when a piece of hardware dies, and I posted this as a
cautionary note to others like me who have to keep legacy setups like this
alive for a while longer (motivated, probably like me, by the need to spend
time on other things).

I'll redesign this from scratch when SSDs are compellingly low-priced.  Right
now that's not really the case; for my home media server it makes little sense
to blow $8000 on SSDs just to save myself from swapping a drive once every
couple of years (which is how things were until Seagate went off the deep
end).

When you mentioned "HDDs dying in only 1 year", I had a laugh: in my notes
from a year ago, I wrote that one of these damn Seagate 3TB units failed 380
days after I bought it, after two weeks of increasing trouble with bad blocks.
 Its warranty had expired at 365 days. :-(

I don't know what year I'll go SSD but I do know this: I will never have to
buy Seagate again.  Thank goodness.

-rich