bart@ardistech.com wrote:

Mike Dresser wrote:

quoted

On Fri, 23 Jun 2006, Molle Bestefich wrote:

quoted

Christian Pernegger wrote:

quoted

Anything specific wrong with the Maxtors?

I'd watch out regarding the Western Digital disks, apparently they
have a bad habit of turning themselves off when used in RAID mode, for
some reason:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.device-mapper.devel/1980/

The MaxLine III's (7V300F0) with VA111630/670 firmware currently timeout
on a weekly or less basis.. I'm still testing VA111680 on a 15x300 gig
array

We also see similar problem on Maxtor 6V250F0 drives: they 'crash' randomly at
a weeks timescale. Only way to get them back is by power cycling. Tried both
SuperMicro SATA card (Marvell chip) and Promise Fastrak, firmware updates from
Maxtor did not fix it yet. We were already forced to exchange all drives at
a customer because he does not want to use Maxtor's anymore. Neither do we :(

Whereas I have 28 7Y250M0 drives sitting in a couple of arrays here that have behaved perfectly 
(aside from some grown defects) for over 18000 hours so far. They are *all* sitting on Promise 
SATA150TX4 cards on 2.6 kernels.

I'm looking at another server and another 15 drives at the moment, and it's Maxtors I'm looking at.

Everyone has different experience. I would not touch Seagate with a 10 foot pole (blew up way too 
many logic boards when I was using them), and I got bitten *badly* by the WD firmware issue with 
RAID (firmware upgrade fixed that, but can't replace the data I lost when 3 of them failed at the 
same time and the array got corrupted).

Having said that, it was MaxLineIII 300G drives I was looking at, so perhaps I'll wait a little 
longer and hear some more stories before I drop $$ on 15 of them.

Brad
-- 
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