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Author Topic: Degraded array ? Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 06-01-2014 08:05 AM                        I was thinking in terms of 15k SAS or fiber-channel drives as being "enterprise-grade" products. As far as I know, WD does not make those (though their Hitachi division does).  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 06-01-2014 10:18 AM                     I'm with Steve on the Seagates. All levels of drives are absolute crap... I just won't even bother with them any more, they also build up error rates much faster than any other type of,drive out there. Hitachi has also gone slightly down hill since being bought out by WD. I have seen more Hitachi failures on the new production drives than I used to when Hitachi owned the company. Although not anything like the Seagate failures I have had. Still waiting for an OS drive failure to happen in a GDC, the oldest one is about 5 years old now. Also, still waiting for a SSD to fail some place... Been waiting for like 7 years for an SSD to fail... Scott... SAS drives are in a class by themselves... They rarely fail no matter who makes them, all my TMS's run SAS 15k drives in raid 1 for the OS. Zero failures. Mark  |  IP: Logged John Eickhof Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 588 From: Wendell, ID USA Registered: Jan 2000 posted 06-02-2014 01:35 PM                        Thanks guys! Of course they were seagates!! HaHaHa  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 06-02-2014 02:45 PM                     Were you able to verify that actually all three drives were bad? - Carsten  |  IP: Logged John Eickhof Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 588 From: Wendell, ID USA Registered: Jan 2000 posted 06-03-2014 01:21 PM                        Yes, when GDC logged on they found degradation on all three and said the best thing to do is replace the whole array. It's actually quicker than replacing a single drive and configuring it.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 06-03-2014 02:49 PM                     And they usually ship them out with all the basic content on the drives already loaded.  |  IP: Logged Justin Hamaker Film God Posts: 2253 From: Lakeport, CA USA Registered: Jan 2004 posted 11-10-2014 03:53 PM                        Since we are 3+ years in on all of our GDC servers - and several are 4+, we're going to buy some spare drives to keep on the shelf. With regard to the OS drive, is the cloning process any more difficult than cloning a HDD under normal circumstances? Would cloning the OS drive for one projector preclude it from being used in a different projector? Is it just a matter of having GDC apply the appropriate certificate when the drive is placed into use? With the array drives, how critical is it to use the same drive? Most of our servers use the Hitachi HUA7220, but a few have various Seagate drives. While I can find plenty of the HUA7220 drives right now on eBay, it appears this is a discontinued model. Can a single failed drive be replaced with an off-the shelf drive of the same specs (2TB 7200 RPM is what most of our drives are), or does the whole array need to be replaced with the same drive? Can a single 1TB Seagate drive be replaced with a 2TB Hitachi drive?  |  IP: Logged Dave Macaulay Film God Posts: 2321 From: Toronto, Canada Registered: Apr 2001 posted 11-11-2014 06:41 AM                     My experience is that although it may be best to use identical drives in a RAID set, mixing doesn't seem to be a problem. You should use "enterprise" drives, not consumer drives. How they handle errors is differently and consumer drives can cause playback issues if (when) they are dealing with error correction, from what I can learn. Installing a replacement 2TB drive into an array of 1TB drives works fine, but you only use 1TB of the new drive. With 4K releases getting more common, rebuilding the RAID with all 2TB drives in is a good idea if you tend to need several features in your server concurrently. The drives originally installed in servers installed a couple of years ago are going obsolete, and identical replacements becoming unavailable. Check with your server manufacturer for a current list of recommended drives. Buying the drives from the manufacturer will be considerably more expensive than purchasing from a local supplier. However, if your server is under warranty, doing that might have consequences.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 11-11-2014 04:45 PM                     You should try to get HGST drives which is the new name for Hitachi. All three should be the same in a GDC because it is software RAID. You can also use 2 TB drives if you wish. When you clone the OS drive just be sure to clone all the partitions on it and it has to be a bootable system drive when it's all said and done! Some of this depends on what HD cloning software you are using. Mark  |  IP: Logged Marcel Birgelen Film God Posts: 3357 From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands Registered: Feb 2012 posted 11-11-2014 05:18 PM                     What you should know is that some firmwares are known to "fudge" the numbers regarding read failure rates you're getting from Smart. Seagate, for example, reports actual numbers, whereas Western Digital reports some number they made up themselves. This might make Seagate look bad in this regard. Furthermore, it's really difficult to point out one brand as the clear winner. Essentially, there are only two manufacturers left: Seagate and Western Digital. HGST is a WD subsidiary and it probably won't take long before the Hitachi will disappear entirely. Most manufacturers have had their good series and their bad series. Some had major firmware snafus, etc.  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 11-12-2014 06:17 AM                     Yeah...like Seagate...way too many of their drives have had issues. Without a doubt, if you are retaining the 1TB drive size, I'd stick with the HUA722010CLA330. It is, by far, the best drive used in DCinema on any brand server in the 1TB size. Just like xenon lamps, I'm not saying there haven't been ANY failures or premature aging...but compared to Seagate...they have been golden. They are also in current manufacture under the HGST badge of Western Digital. You can still find some left under the Hitachi badge but they are clearly left overs from the last production.  |  IP: Logged

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