topic Re: Harddisk Crash in Disk Enclosures

Harddisk Crash

mehul_3 — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 04:47:20 GMT

What are the different reasons to crash a harddisk. One of the reason I learned from my collegue is that if heavy transaction(more read/write operation) occurs in database.
We have been using oracle database and HP-UX11i operating system.The billing system is implemented on it. 1GB of data growth per month.

Mehul

Re: Harddisk Crash

Keith Bryson — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 08:33:37 GMT

Hi Mehul (I hope I understand your query and apologise if any of this is obvious to you)

Higher activity will obviously shorten the life-span of a hard drive - but there are so many other factors that should be avoided/considered:

General environment; temperature/humidity/cleanliness/power supply (power outages often cause multiple drive failures, as most drives spin for years without being switched off). Even forgetting to acclimatize a disk (before using) can shorten it's life.

If you are concerned about drive reliability, use HP tools like MirrorDisk UX to implement software mirroring and take regular backups!

You can monitor drive errors using the online diag tool 'stm' this may give an indication into whether a drive will fail in the near future. Often though, disks just blow with no warning.

All the best - Keith

Re: Harddisk Crash

Keith Bryson — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 08:48:20 GMT

I suppose you could be asking about disk thrashing and poor performance?

Drop another post and clarify for us all.

Keith