Re: Bad disks or bug ?

["Ing. Gianluca Alberici" <alberici@abinetworks.biz>]

Heinrich,

Your analysis shows you know well what we're talking about and i think 
finally
you gave the optimal explanation...

I know very well the problems of the IBM DTLA series (i have a dozen of 
zombies here...)
and was mainly concerned about Maxtor disks.

Finally i agree it must be something that has to do with the use of 
hardware and/or firmware...

I will of course substitute my backup drive immediately !

Regards and thanks,

Gianluca

Heinrich Stamerjohanns wrote:

>Der Gianluca, 
>
>I guess you have an IBM Deskstar (or now Hitachi), possibly a DTLA-307045?
>
>We have the same setup: main disk is /dev/hda, backup disk (every night) 
>is /dev/hdb.
>
>One just crashed yesterday, it is the fifth IBM (out of five) that 
>crashed (this is already a replacement disk...). 
>Don't worry your IBM /dev/hda will crash sooner or later as well ;)
>
>But when I investigated after the first crash, I read something like
>that these disk especially do not cope with the situation that they are 
>only infrequently used, but then heavily (no use at all, then continous 
>backup..). The firmware has supposedly changed since then, but it
>has not helped the replacment drive.
>So I guess your problem with /dev/hdb is rather a hardware than 
>a software problem. 
>
>To be sure you could make /dev/hdb your main disk and backup to /dev/hda.
>I am quite sure that /dev/hda will give up first then. (But it happened to 
>us that the main drive died two days later, without a replaced backup 
>drive...)
>
>Greetings, Heinrich
> 
>
>--
>  Dr. Heinrich Stamerjohanns        Tel. +49-441-798-4276
>  Institute for Science Networking  stamer@uni-oldenburg.de
>  University of Oldenburg           http://isn.uni-oldenburg.de/~stamer
>
>  
>