[rescue] Hard disk lifespans in Sun gear

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Thursday 18 October 2007, Mr Ian Primus wrote:
> > The Ultra 2 supports two, 1" tall SCA SCSI drives,
> > they are squeezed in on the right side of the case,
> > under the floppy/Optical drives, and are cooled
> > indirectly, AFAIK (they do not have any direct fans
> > cooling the drives) with outside air being drawn in
> > over the drives.
>
> This is correct. I already checked and cleaned the air
> path before I replaced the first drive (I vacuumed a
> ton of fuzz out of that machine...)  The fans on the
> left pull air across the memory (of which this machine
> only has 256mb, so the path is clear), and across the
> drives. I think they're getting enough cooling.
>
> I think I'm just going to call this one a random
> failure caused by old parts. I have the mirrors
> rebuilt (again) on another Sun 9 gig drive (this time,
> an IBM one) and I'll see how things go.
>
> Any recommendations on reliable drives for these
> machines?

How about new drives?  Or drives that aren't more than 2 or 3 years old?

Seagates are OK, Fujitsus are better.  The less use the drive has gotten 
(assuming some use, I'm not sure I'd trust a NOS 5-year old drive any 
more than a heavily-used 5-year old drive), the better.  By that I 
don't mean just time spent spinning, but less accesses to the drive (a 
drive that used to be an OS drive on a machine would be preferable to 
one that was used to hold a database or mail spool).

Pat
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