SUMMARY: Drive Crash Rate

On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 10:26:58AM -0500, I wrote:
> If I have n drives, how many drives should go bad a month?
> 
> I ask because I have ~10 systems (Dell's, ASLabs, Promise
> UltraTrak's) with ~200 drives (IDE, SCSI, various brands) between them
> all.  I get about one drive go bad a month, is this number as
> expected?  Should I be aggressively scrutinizing my machine closet
> environment or be content with what I have?
> 
> 	Sven


First, to the flames that this isn't Linux enough to be posted.  I put
off posting for a couple of months because I was wondering about that.
Sorry.

Some people thought my drive crash rate of about one a month was
outrageously high.  Others though it seemed about right.  So I've come
to the conclusion that I'm in error tolerance of average, but
improvements can and will be made.  People who thought it was average
should probably think about what's wrong too.


Helpful people gave me my range of failure rates.  The low was 0.5%,
the high being 6%.  Whatever the rate, my systems have had about the
some failure rate since they have been new.  No noticeable increase,
though I did reduce same system from 20 internal drives to 16.

Steven W. Orr had the most immediate idea, run smartd (the smartsuite
package on Debian).  Thank you Mr. Orr, I hadn't know about this
package before.

I will be phasing out some of the old IDE drives, the cause of a
majority, but not all, of the crashes.  However the budget does not
allow for SCSI RAIDs.  We have had luck with UltraTrak's, I have 24
drives in these, and have only lost one in two years.  I should be
putting 30 more drives in new ones of these shortly.
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