HDD Question

[Excalabur50]

G'day everyone got a question for you a mate of mine is going to have a few hdd's for movie storage and here is the question, If a hdd is not accessed much is it more or less likely to fail than if he were to raid the drives and have them accessed all the time? Cheers in advance for your answers

 

[fcb]

If you're not constantly accessing data from the storage drive, then I think something like a WD 1TB Green would be fantastic. Even if you use it, it'll only be spinning once you're using files here and there. I wouldn't worry too much if you're going to have a few of them just as separate storage for different types of media. As for RAID, I think it depends on the setup you would want. Typically you wouldn't setup RAID 0 for the few storage drives that you'd have because it won't be able to rebuild the lost/damaged data if the RAID 0 or the drives become defective. I think something like a RAID 5 will be great for storage as I recall it being capable of hot swapping and being able to rebuild its info in the case of damage or loss of the array. Not sure if this makes any sense? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[Azurite]

You could also use raid 1. You get the same data on both and it writes on both automatically. If one goes bad you still have data on second one.

 

[fcb]

You could also use raid 1. You get the same data on both and it writes on both automatically. If one goes bad you still have data on second one.

Yup, that's also a good idea too. RAID 1 has the mirror function so everything you're saving onto 1 storage drive gets duplicated to the other drives as well.

 

[Excalabur50]

Thanks for the replies I have informed my mate now it's up to him.

 

[Rastalovich]

If you want to be reeeally smart, you can lessen the spin-ups of harddrives further.

Every time you open explorer, every assigned letter drive will spin up as Windows sniffs it for details.

Aha! Well, what you 'can' do is go into Disk Management and use a mount point for the harddrive and remove the assigned drive letter.

This way the drive no longer has a letter that explorer will sniff every time you open it. To access the drive you open the mount shortcut.

Googleay is your friend here.

 

[BaMb1N0]

a desktop drive's life expectancy is usually defined through the number of times the head is unparked/parked in the so called "landing zone". so one could argue that less usage ultimately leads to longer life. but there are several other components than the platter and the head that can fail: motor, bearing, controller chip, cache memory....

at work i often see perfectly working old drives (4y+) not spinning up again after a server hot or cold restart. usually a problem with the motor or bearing being worn off too much.

no raid level will prevent a drive from failing, but it will make a data loss less likely to occur. the important thing is that you backup your data regularly. raid levels >=1 are no replacement for backup!

imho you should consider RAID 5 as you will only loose 1/n of your disk capacity, n standing for the number of drives in the raid 5 array > 2. raid 1 is cool, too. but i do not use that very often. maybe on systems where the parity calculations (xor-operation) can cause problems (such as database servers) or operating system disks.

out of my point of view, harddrives are expendable items. it only gets messy should you expierence any kind of data loss.

 

[Excalabur50]

Thanks for the replies