[Discuss] Striping is bad

[markw at mohawksoft.com (markw at mohawksoft.com)]

Most of us have been in the business for some time now and know, wuite
well, the does and don'ts of technology. As we all know, sometimes you do
things that you think will "be ok." "It won't happen to me." etc. I set up
the system with striping (RAID0) with no redundancy.

Well, I got burned. I have a DLink DNS-321 NAS box. I've had it for almost
two years. When I bought it, I bought two 1TB Hitachi drives. On
valentines day, drive 1 dies a hard death. No bad sectors, no partial data
loss. The drive would not even spin up.

I took the electronics board from the good drive and tried it on the bad
drive. The motor spun up, but the disk arms would not move (no audible
motion like the good drive).

So, I lost some data. Most of it is scattered across 3 or 4 laptops and my
desktop, but some if it is lost forever.

So, two lessons learned: (1) when you know better, listen to yourself. (2)
don't buy Hitachi hard disks.