Formatting the Seagate 1.5tb

There is wear and tear, yes; the drive is moving. Is it consequential? No, it isn't. On the other hand, does reading the data and rewriting it cause any improvement? Absolutely not.
 
Better not use that SpinRite app on your SSD :p
 
GeorgeHR said:
I guess we could a full format. Perhaps send a couple years to do some real stress testing.

But ...

Hard drives are really cheap. Better off to by 2. Use RAID 0 (or is it 1) to duplicate the data. Toss the first one that fails.

(4 hours of my time bills out well over the cost of a 1.5GB hard drive.)
Click to expand...

Sorry this is flawed logic, you are relying on either the SMART aware drive or the RAID controller to tell you of an error before copying it to the 2nd drive in the array. While your time is worth more, how much is your data worth? Like many people have said RAID is not a protection against backup or virus or being stupid and deleting a file, the controller will copy that action faster than you can take action. Plus, do you really need to babysit the format, go shopping, mow the lawn, sleep; it's not like you're chained to the computer while it does it's thing.

I'll go even further and give you an example, I had a small RAID 5 array for DVD storage, copied some movies onto it, watched them, seemed fine. Months later I build a new array copy the movies to the new array, everything seems good. 3 weeks later movies start playing mixed, start up Terminator 2, all of a sudden The Sopranos plays for a few minutes, then back to the movie. Checked more, same thing, copied the data off, scanned through some with VirtualDub and they are all mixed. How did this happen I'll never know, hard disk read error, raid controller, windows error, did I have time to check hundreds of hours of video footage, nope but I did have it all backed up previously minus a few newer movies to some single drives and the recovery went fast, wipe the array and copy back over from the backup drives and I was good to go in a few hours. But nothing caught the error and I didn't catch it for however long it was there, luckily it was just movies but had it been important photos or documents without the backup I would have been SOL even with RAID and yes I had a few text files of notes from notepad and they were all FUBAR too.
 
mrwhitethc said:
Sorry this is flawed logic, you are relying on either the SMART aware drive or the RAID controller to tell you of an error before copying it to the 2nd drive in the array. While your time is worth more, how much is your data worth? Like many people have said RAID is not a protection against backup or virus or being stupid and deleting a file, the controller will copy that action faster than you can take action. Plus, do you really need to babysit the format, go shopping, mow the lawn, sleep; it's not like you're chained to the computer while it does it's thing.

I'll go even further and give you an example, I had a small RAID 5 array for DVD storage, copied some movies onto it, watched them, seemed fine. Months later I build a new array copy the movies to the new array, everything seems good. 3 weeks later movies start playing mixed, start up Terminator 2, all of a sudden The Sopranos plays for a few minutes, then back to the movie. Checked more, same thing, copied the data off, scanned through some with VirtualDub and they are all mixed. How did this happen I'll never know, hard disk read error, raid controller, windows error, did I have time to check hundreds of hours of video footage, nope but I did have it all backed up previously minus a few newer movies to some single drives and the recovery went fast, wipe the array and copy back over from the backup drives and I was good to go in a few hours. But nothing caught the error and I didn't catch it for however long it was there, luckily it was just movies but had it been important photos or documents without the backup I would have been SOL even with RAID and yes I had a few text files of notes from notepad and they were all FUBAR too.
Click to expand...

Except that RAID1 doesn't copy drive-to-drive. it copies the data as it comes from the system. So corrupted data on one drive isn't going to affect the other one UNLESS that data corrupted was rewritten to the array. Even then, you're right, RAIDx is not backup.
 
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