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[benn600]

This morning I woke up to a second drive failure.  So I replaced the drive with one I had on hand.  Again, the drive seems to work fine when I use it in an external enclosure.  So that is two drive failures since setting it up.  I will have to lookup when exactly it failed but they were each probably 3 months apart.  It is not completely bad because I can add it to my backup space but I also wonder if I should just keep it ready and use it as my next replacement drive when then next drive fails.

It is rebuilding right now and at about 15%.

[KingSparta]

Who Made The Hard Drives?

[benn600]

Western Digital.

[KingSparta]

I Recently Lost A 750Gig Maxtor Drive, It Was 30 Days From The Warranty Termination (1 Year Warranty).

I Should Get The Replacement This Week.

[benn600]

I wouldn't want to get a replacement, though, because like I said, it works fine when I put it in an enclosure.  If I formatted it and put it back in the array it would probably work fine but I don't need to take that chance since I have a replacement drive anyway.

[johnnyboy]

over heating?
Not getting enough power?

[benn600]

I think I got an 800 watt power supply.  It is double what I had before and the previous supply handled the drives (apparently) fine.

And it has 5 high powered fans that suck tons of air over all the drives.

In other words, I am led to believe that it is a well designed case.  I personally would like more space between the drives but all high drive count cases seem to have the drives almost touching each other with big fans.

[newsposter]

In very rough terms, with large numbers of drives, the MTBF gets DIVIDED by the number of drives in service.

So if you have lots of spindles running, expect to see monthly or even weekly failures.  This tends to trend upwards as drives age, then plateau for some period of time, then spike again.

In large disk installations with hundreds/thousands of spindles, it's not unusual to get daily drive failures and have an array in a constant state of rebuild.

[benn600]

Okay.  But isn't it strange that I take the drive out and use it externally and it works fine?  What kind of algorithm is used to determine if a drive is good or bad?  Course it depends on manufacturer obviously.

[newsposter]

likely your raid card is accessing the SMART internal diagnostic info on the drive.  This is a lot more definitive than using a 'dumb' OS formatting program.