Absolutely no luck with hard drives

[13oots2]

I had 4 drives beginning to show signs of failure, 2x1TB and 2x2TB in 2 drive groups RAID 0, I backed up most of my data to a remaining 2x3TB RAID 0 and bought 2x2TB and 2x3TB drives to replace the now failed ones.

The drives arrived a couple of days later and after fitting them one new 3TB drive was missing from the MegaRAID software, checked all the cabling and then one of my original 3TB drives disappeared. I initially thought it was a cable problem until I noticed the pool of clear green liquid on top of 2 of the drives, yep, I had disturbed a fitting in my water-cooling and killed the drives with pretty much all the data I had backed up. Luckily, a lot of the data was backed up until I realised I hadn't remembered doing all my photos, a frantic search found my music drive had copies of them, so spent all night uploading them to Google Drive.

One good thing was what I thought was a failed 8TB drive came back from the dead, didn't work at all, turns out that was a janky SATA power connector, so I did get some space back. All the lost files can be replaced, so it isn't an end of the world scenario, it will just take some time.

I have a couple of SAS drives and a second LSI card, so may fit those later, I will just be more than a little careful to check my fittings a couple of times before firing up the computer. I may be back again later with conflict problems running 2 LSI cards, have plenty of PCIe lanes on my X299 platform, so should be OK there.

 

[Bluecube]

Purely a personal opinion but I wouldn’t have liquid cooling anywhere near so many important data drives

 

[Semple]

Also I really wouldn't bother with RAID 0, if you need somewhere to land data at speed /caching then use a SSD or nvme. Then just buy yourself bigger drives - last I checked £\GB was more expensive under about 4TB.

 

[13oots2]

Also I really wouldn't bother with RAID 0, if you need somewhere to land data at speed /caching then use a SSD or nvme. Then just buy yourself bigger drives - last I checked £\GB was more expensive under about 4TB.

I accept the risks associated RAID 0,I like to have shortcuts to all my drives on the desktop, with my setup at the moment would have 13 drive shortcuts. If I split the drives to singles it would annoy me immensely if I had that many, I like a clear desktop with a few shortcuts, it's one of my pet peeves in life.

I also buy enterprise disks that have been refurbished and have not experienced too many problems until now, all the failed drives were standard desktop variety. Just bought 2x10TB HGST for a snip under £140, my SLR camera takes RAW starting at about 50mb and have started playing around with the many A.I features of Visions Of Chaos, so am already making an impact on the storage space I have.

 

[JasonM]

I've been very lucky with HDD's over the years, it's actually been SSD's that have given me more issues.

The HDD's I use are Western Digital Gold / RE drives, I found WD Black HDD's just as good, never had a single issue with any of these.

 

[John24]

That's a nightmare. Got about 30TB sitting under an AIO not backed up, everytime the PC makes a weird noise I flintch but what a rush

It's not raid though, I use stablebit drivepool. Might be of interest to you. Some people use snapraid to backup the pool as well (I should probably set it up).

 

[Bito]

i too have had good luck with Western Digital Black hdd’s. Never had a problem with these, although recently relegated to backup duties.

 

[Armageus]

I had 4 drives beginning to show signs of failure, 2x1TB and 2x2TB in 2 drive groups RAID 0, I backed up most of my data to a remaining 2x3TB RAID 0 and bought 2x2TB and 2x3TB drives to replace the now failed ones.

The more drives you have, the more chance of failure.

Also 2003 Called, it wants it's RAID0 back

(Running them in RAID0 you are potentially "amplifying" wear on the drives, simply from the fact that any read of a file, is reading 2 disks each time)

I accept the risks associated RAID 0,I like to have shortcuts to all my drives on the desktop, with my setup at the moment would have 13 drive shortcuts. If I split the drives to singles it would annoy me immensely if I had that many, I like a clear desktop with a few shortcuts, it's one of my pet peeves in life.

Consolidating drive letters isn't a reason to run RAID0, it's an excuse. There are so many other options:
- If you want a clean desktop just create one folder and then drop shortcuts to all the individual drives in there.
- Look into Mount points rather than drive letters
- Use Windows Storage Spaces, Stablebit Drive Pool, or other option to consolidate dries on your local machine
- Better yet - move all of your storage to a NAS, whether that be Unraid (with it's drive pooling+parity protection), or NAS hardware with RAID5/6/10 depending on how expendable your data is.

 

[13oots2]

The more drives you have, the more chance of failure.

Also 2003 Called, it wants it's RAID0 back

(Running them in RAID0 you are potentially "amplifying" wear on the drives, simply from the fact that any read of a file, is reading 2 disks each time)




Consolidating drive letters isn't a reason to run RAID0, it's an excuse. There are so many other options:
- If you want a clean desktop just create one folder and then drop shortcuts to all the individual drives in there.
- Look into Mount points rather than drive letters
- Use Windows Storage Spaces, Stablebit Drive Pool, or other option to consolidate dries on your local machine
- Better yet - move all of your storage to a NAS, whether that be Unraid (with it's drive pooling+parity protection), or NAS hardware with RAID5/6/10 depending on how expendable your data is.

To be totally honest, I have a form of bipolar and have some weird quirks, I just love playing around with hardware and like running LSI cards with drives in RAID 0. All my important data is backed up to Google Drive, music to multiple drives and an external drive, it's just bulk storage for films that I can get again.