Small business backups solutions?

[Tom Buskey]

On Feb 5, 2008 6:23 PM, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Feb 5, 2008 6:11 PM, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
> > e.SATA lets you use S.M.A.R.T so you can know if a drive is ailing.
>
>  s/can/might/
>
>  I've discovered SMART isn't always that smart.  I've had drives
> which were actively returning media errors to the host adapter, and
> were then unable to complete the smartctl tests successfully, still
> report their overall SMART health status as good.  I imagine this
> varies with manufacturer/drive/firmware/weather/etc.
>
>  Just an FYI.  Better to have SMART than not, for sure.


Google  had a white paper on drive reliability and SMART awhile ago.  A week
before that there was another by CERN?  They both said SMART was not a
reliable indicator of failure. They also didn't find much difference in the
reliability of SCSI vs IDE/SATA.

FWIW I dropped a laptop & started getting lots of SMART errors.  I put a new
drive in the laptop and put the failing drive in an external USB case for
shuttling data.  I haven't gotten any errors from the drive since, but I'm
not using it as much either.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/private/gnhlug-discuss/attachments/20080206/f72d4be5/attachment.html