[Coco] Possible CoCo Bulletin Board forum

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 26 December 2008, Steven Hirsch wrote:
>On Thu, 25 Dec 2008, Gene Heskett wrote:
>>>> Anyway, the virtual tapes, on a 500GB hard drive, are many times more
>>>> dependable, I've not lost a byte since.  And I don't worry about
>>>> backups, I have a user named amanda who runs herself evey morning at a
>>>> little after 1 and does all that without any interference from me.
>>>
>>> I would be very concerned about putting all my eggs in one basket like
>>> that.  My working theory on hard drives is that there are two types:
>>>
>>> Those that have failed already and those that are about to.
>>
>> I tend to agree, but it has also been my experience that if one peruses
>> the logs, you will see an error or 30 before they drop over.  I use that
>> for a hint to get my butt to town and get another drive and copy it to the
>> new drive, before the failure is total.  I have done that twice since 2001
>> when I switched.
>
>This is drifting a bit off-topic (perhaps an understatement), so one last
>remark.  Google published a comprehensive study of drive reliability based
>on their own in-house experience with the subject.  ISTR that they found
>little correlation between advance warnings from SMART and impending
>failure.  I guess it comes down to one's comfort factor in the long run,
>though.

I look at them occasionally just for grins & if I see an error than smartctl 
gets a wakeup call.  A drive with 200k logged retries is soon laying in a 
pile of similar drives, to be used for test installs, a paperweight or 
whatever around here.  A little paranoia is cheap compared to losing it all.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Data, n.:
	Computerspeak for "information".  Properly pronounced
	the way Bostonians pronounce the word for a female child.