A bad week for my disks

By andy
Published on July 16th, 2006

A power-cut took out the disk with my /home on it on my desktop at work (Seagate Baracuda SATA), something undetermined killed the disk in my laptop (Toshiba disk inside Powerbook), and now the disk in my home desktop has started making an interesting noise - a little like a puppy (Maxtor SCSI inside Ultra 60).

When buying disks (this is for internal use rather than resale, and we have standardised on Seagate SATA models at work), we have grown to expect (and try to cater for) a 2-ish% failure rate of new models. We actually expect a handful of disks to be DOA whenever we buy any. We don’t build any such expectations into orders of other components. This is before any disks die in service, which they tend to like to do.

Looking after desktop storage is relatively easy when you export user writable areas over a network. Raid mirroring, and decent disks go a long way to continuity of storage service. But here you’re really just masking the underlying problem - magnetic storage is terrible today. This is also no help for mobile computer users, and it seems disks inside mobile computers are most at risk.

Companies like Bitmicro are bringing drop in replacements for your typical desktop disks, that use solid state electronics instead of magnetic methods. They are slow, though. The Barracuda disk in my desktop brags sustained read speed of 150MB/s (though hdparm claims that’s closer to 80). The Bitmicro device is only capable of 28.

There is tonnes of opportunity for development in this area. If the storage can be battery backed, instead of relying on some high-end controller to take a write-cache, then great, we’re better protected from the sort of data corruption that can occur after a power failure. If transfer can get faster, then the lines between RAM and permenant storage starts to blur. Imagine if you simply had to cater for what we call swap today - this would make memory requirement planning and upgrades easy. Moreso if these next-generation disk drives are hot-swap..

But, for today, my experiences of the previous week exist to remind me - backups are really important. Take lots of them.


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