[Coco] CF and SD life expectancy

[Steven Hirsch]

On Wed, 27 Jul 2011, gene heskett wrote:

> On Wednesday, July 27, 2011 10:23:08 AM Steven Hirsch did opine:
>
>> On Wed, 27 Jul 2011, gene heskett wrote:
>>> For dw users, dsaving to a disk image file on the pc is probably the
>>> least trouble as it can then be part of the regularly scheduled
>>> backups like I do every night with *amanda here on this linux box,
>>> using amanda with virtual tapes on a terrabyte hard drive.
>>
>> I hope you are religously monitoring that backup drive with SMART.
>
> Of cuz I am. all 4 of the terabyte drives in this machine. ;-)
> And I have one screen delegated to tailing logs, so I see lots of temp
> changes being reported.

Thou art much SMARTer than I, in that case.  I fell into the bad habit of 
thinking my late 3ware SATA RAID would let me know if drives were heading 
south.  Unfortunately it did not and I had a cascade failure (one dead on 
power up, the second during rebuild).  The RAID controller itself then 
fell on top of the burial heap.  Not one of my better days here in data 
central.

Important lesson:  Hardware RAID is terrific when it works.  When the 
controller dies, however, your data is held hostage.  With Linux software 
RAID, all you need is another machine with multiple ports.

Live and learn.

Steve




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