3rd HD Failure on a Raid 5 in 3 Years...

J

Jutsu

[H]ard|Gawd
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Ok we have a HP Proliant ML350 G5 running E200i Smart Array with two Raid 5s. One for OS and one for Data.

The 6 drives are HP/Seagate 250GB SATA ES.2

Today marks the third complete hard drive failure in three years. We have had 1 each year since the server was originally put into production.

Whats do you guys think? Is the hard drives? The raid controller? Or the enclosure its self.

Failure 1 - Port 2
Failure 2 - Port 3
Failure 3 - Port 6

Seatools, reporting complete failure, all tests fail instantly, cant even zero write.

If its just the drives then I am thinking about just upgrading them all to WD drives but it could be the raid controller itself. Luckily though I haven't had two drives go at once.
 
If Seatools reporting drives dead then its got nothing to do with your raid controller or enclosure. Replace disks and move on.
 
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that is what RAID 5 is for. you would have lost all your info 3 times without it. replace the drive and keep going.
 
For the sake of elimination, connect one of the drives to a motherboard SATA port in another machine, then run SeaTools. If the drive is reported dead, then it's the drive. If not, then the controller is doing something weird.

In all likelihood however, it's the drives themselves although there could be some kind of incompatibility between the drives and controller. Seagate have a bad enough rep with their consumer level stuff, but that kind of failure rate on enterprise-class stuff is alarming. Of the failed drives, were any of them RMA replacements?

As for replacements, I'd go for Western Digital RAID Edition or Hitachi UltraStar units. Both are very very reliable.
 
You are using desktop-grade Seagate HDDs, some of the worst HDDs on the market for failure rates.

Next time, if you use Seagate, opt for their Cheetahs, they are far more reliable and durable. For anything else, go with WD for the best reliability. If you are using hardware RAID, make sure to get a drive which can have TLER enabled.
 
I believe he said Seagate ES.2 which are drives designated by Seagate for RAID/Enterprise storage. Comes with a 5 year warranty. I had ~15 of the 1TB drives in a RAID array at one point. That said, I don't think they're very reliable drives.

In the 2.5 years I had them in operation, at least 5 drives died and had to be replaced under warranty. Seagate's warranty exchange process is top notch however. Western Digital is too, BTW. Anyway, I have since gotten rid of all these 1TB Seagates. While Western Digitals I had in other RAID arrays faired better than the Seagates, I had my fair share of returns as well (WD RE4 and Raptors). I still use Raptors for OS RAID 1 however.

At the same time I had these Seagates operating, I also had 12 1TB Hitachi desktop grade hard drives in operation in a hardware RAID 5. To this day, not one of those drives failed and they are still in operation as I type this.

Also, in 2005 I had a server equipped with 10 500 Gig Hitachi desktop drives. They worked without failure for 3 years, was shut down for about a year and now has returned to service as of early 2009. Not one of those drives have failed.

I now have 24 2TB Hitachis in a hardware RAID 6. 12 have been in operation for a little over a year now and over time, I've been adding one or two. Not one of those drives have failed so far.

Anyway, the OP mentioned they are HP/Seagates so I'm guessing these are the drives from HP certified for use in Proliant servers. The firmware in these drives are different than off the shelf ES.2 drives. Additional space is usually allocated for sector relocation for grown defects, which actually gives you slightly less end user storage than the retail versions of these drives. The HP RAID controllers look for HP approved drives and if you try using a retail drive, they throw a fit with all sorts of warning messages on POST. If you want HP's warranty and support to cover all aspects of your Proliant, you have to use their drives. Just keep on sending them back and hopefully you'll get something other than Seagate.
 
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