On Sat, 2007-10-13 at 11:28 +0100, Chris G wrote:
I have had a couple of disks do that, but only after showing some signs of failure beforehand. Like one that was sticky starting and needed a quick thump to spin up, after about the second 'start with a thump' I copied all the data off it. It carried on working in non-critical roles for quite a while after that.
Some go like that but others go with no warning (no warning in that no noise was heard and no automated health monitoring was being run) or go like that faulty series of fujitsu's where one day they just stop appearing on the bus. Smartd won't predict impending electrical failure and nor will you get any noise. Also some drives go through the warning signs to total failure stage very quickly (as in overnight)
I've also had a couple which have developed a few bad blocks before rapidly deteriorating into uselessness, again I've had ample time to remove all imprtant data before the end.
Yes and that is fine as long as you are monitoring such things. But in my experience it is far better to have systems that have a degree of tolerance to failures than to rely on something or someone noticing an impending failure (In a perfect world you have both)