Back up and running.

[BarracudaUAK]

I mentioned this in Reece's Ubuntu questions thread...


I lost a Hard drive about a month ago, which wiped out my RAID 0 (striped, no redundancy). Fortunately I had copied the entire "Home" directory to another drive, so I lost only a few save games from HL2...

After trying some WD Black 7200 RPM drives, I finally managed to find another 2TB Seagate.

(I found out, WD 1TB are single platter drives, 2TB/3TB/4TB, are 3/4/5 platters respectively, which means that the larger drives are faster on load times.)

Of all the drives I have, 2 1TB Seagate (backup, not operating unless copying to the drive), 4 2TB Seagate, and 4 1TB WD Black, using 1GB file sizes for benchmark...

1TB Seagates averaged about 182MB/Sec Read/Write speed (each), peak at 202MB/sec.
2TB average about 180MB/Sec, peak 200MB/S, with the replacement peaking at
217MB/s (!). Minimum for all Seagates at the "end" of the drive is 100MB/Sec.
WD 1TB average about 167MB/Sec, peak at about 190-195 (over 4 drives). Minimum of about 100MB/S.


In a Raid 0:

WD 650MB/Sec average in the first 30% of the drive, after that it slowed down to a minimum of 400MB/Sec. And for some reason the system kept trying to put the "home" directory at the slow end of the drive ...
Kept having trouble manually setting up the Raid, install program can be a bit fussy about pre-existing Raids.

My Seagates where averaging 765MB/Sec on the "home" partition, which was over 1TB in size, meaning it was faster across the first half of the drive, than the WD 1TB were in the first quarter of the drive...
Peaked at 800MB/Sec, with a minumum of 400MB/S on the "slow" end.

I retried the WDs in RAID 10, and it was even worse.... but it would have some redundancy... But I finally found a store with Seagate drives in stock, so I picked up another 2TB, and setup a RAID 10.

This time I setup a RAID 10 far configuration in Linux.
In RAID 10 Far, I get about (with the same partition sizes as before) 720-729MB/Sec read speed. Now because it has to write a mirror of everything (the "1" part of the "10")
Write speed is about half, about 350-370MB/Sec (give or take about 20MB/sec).

So I'm finally up, my backup copied back to my system, and I'm running at about 95% of my original speed, but with a bit of redundancy, I can (but hopefully won't) lose another drive, and NOT lose the whole system!

Moral of the story... make backups.
2nd Moral of the story, I can't simply say.... "my PC is fixed".


Barracuda

[Reece]

That's good news, of all the pc's I've owned I only had one drive die on me, it was a Seagate, my preferred drive, though recently I've heard they are not as reliable. (I hope that is not the case)
Well it certainly wasn't an overnight job but I bet you're glad it is finished. . . or is it??

[BarracudaUAK]

Well I'm hoping it is all good for now...


I've had 4 drives fail on me in various machines...

2 Seagate, 2 Western Digital.

1st was a 1 GB IDE that failed sometime in 2005 (I think). I had used it as the C:\ drive for Win98. I had an additional 100GB WD for all the games, downloads, etc.
That one died because when I got a newer drive for the OS, I copied what I needed off of the drive, but it was running on top of the small tower that I had. The desk got bumped sliding it off the edge, the controller board on the bottom of the drive touched the case and fried the drive.

The next drive to go out was that 100GB WD IDE a few years later.
WD had identified a flaw in the (first I think) batch of drives that mine was in, and they were going to all fail within about a year or so. At the time I didn't have a means to back it up. So I saved for another drive. The 100GB did finally "die" at around 5-6 years old.
In the mean time it had been the "game drive", the download drive, and the "Copy the mod from here" drive. It was also the "swap file" drive.


I replaced this drive with a WD 160GB IDE drive, Initially a secondary drive in a AMD 2500XP that I got from a friend. After I had to replace the MB in the system, I tossed the Maxtor that got a new bad sector just about every day, and I used this WD160 for everything.
WinXP, Fedora Core 3, swap, and games.
This one died in my AMD 5600x2 in the end of 2014, which prompted me to install Fedora 20 on an older WD 40GB IDE that is currently still funtional (and F20 is still installed)...


The 4th and final was that Seagate 2TB. It is also the only drive to have failed anywhere near the warranty period. I think the 2TB actually out-lived its 1 year warranty.
I have noticed this with the newer Seagate drives: My older 1TB is labeled as a "Seagate Barracuda", with the newer labeled as a "Seagate Desktop".

The older drive is faster, regardless of which test that you run on it with the bench marking software.
The 2TB that I just purchased to "fix" my RAID, is labeled as a 'Barracuda', the other 3, and the failed drive are labeled as "Desktop"...
The New "Barracuda" drive is, again, faster in all benchmarks that I've run (read/write, random seek time).
I'm hoping with the return to the "Barracuda" name, marks the return of the reliability that I have come to expect from older Seagates.

My WD on the other hand, are just outright expensive.... The 1TB finally dropped to within $5 of the Seagate 2TB.

I really wanted 15K rpm SAS drives, or at least 10K rpm WD Raptors for this FX-8350, but they were REALLY hard to find...

And again, long winded......
Also, NO, my name didn't come from the hard drive... I've been using this name much longer!

Barracuda

[Reece]

I assumed your name came from the car, I love the one Nash Bridges drives, cool!!!
My current 2 drives in the old XP machines are ST3400620AS, 360Gb, over 6 years old and have been great!! This 'old girl' runs almost all day every day!!

[BarracudaUAK]

Actually, it did come from the car...

While I would take a '71 Hemi 'Cuda in a heartbeat....






I'm partial to the 1970 AAR 'Cuda.

With the Rake and the side exit exhaust...



I would really like to put all of the AAR specific parts (hood, exhaust, stance, etc) on a 71 body, with the fender vents, and that grill....!!!

I built a Revell 1/24th scale model of the AAR, too bad it was my 3rd kit. Paint job was horrible on that one!

Now this looks like something I would build in FORZA 4! Warning! Pic is huge!

 

But then again, I sometimes pull a little from this Barracuda too....



Sometimes when I'm gaming online, and someone makes a sarcastic comment about my name, I'll remind them that it was a Barracuda at the beginning of "Finding Nemo"
that caused all the damage. They generally shut up after that!

But my comment about my name not coming from the drive, was directed more to anybody that might pop in and ask...

Barracuda

[Reece]

Sorry the thread is getting off track a bit!!
Yes the Cuda is a beautiful car, loved the late 60's early 70's era cars.
Here in Australia I owned a Ford XY GS 302 V8 Cleveland, was only 1.5 years old when I got it but this is the one I would loved to have owned:

1972 Ford GT-HO Phase III 351 Cleveland V8.

[BarracudaUAK]

Originally Posted by Reece

Sorry the thread is getting off track a bit!!

No problem, I'm the OP, and I brought up the cars...

Plus my first post included: "mechanical" hard drives, "RPM", references to "speed" and performance... and Cars are hardware, and they put computers in cars now...

The way I see it, completely legit!


Here the 'only' "Cleveland" was the 351, discontinued in 1973. But in 1971 a new tall deck Cleveland was introduced, in full-size fords. Went to trucks in '77.
I have a 400 "M" block (If you search for it, look for a "ford 400M", "ford 400" returns a lot of results for a race).

Here the 351 had "2V" open chamber heads (2.05" intake, 1.66" exhaust valves), or "4V" closed chamber heads (2.15" intake, 1.70" (I think) exhaust).
The 400M and 351M (1974-79) both used the 2V open chamber heads.
But I have seen the 302 Cleveland "2V" closed chamber heads... They would increase the compression ratio from 8.0 to ~10.1. I have some flat-top pistions which with the stock heads give 10:1 comp. ratio... so with both I would be sitting on a nice 11.0:1 - 11.1:1 compression ratio!

Worth about 50-60hp in otherwise stock trim, but I've done some other things to it!

I do like the the GT that you posted, I ran across the FPV GT for the first time in 2003.
I was playing Need for Speed Hot Pursuit (the 2nd one, NFS 6) and it had the TS50, so I went looking for the TS-50 and found the FPV GT and GT-P.

I REALLY like those, not as impressed with the ~2010-2016 models. Although I wouldn't complain if I was given the keys to one.


Please NOTE: To anyone stumbling across this thread while searching the internet for info on a Ford 400... YES I know it is a Ford "400" not a "400M".
HOWEVER, when I search the net (google, yahoo, etc) and get results for a race, or when I walk into the parts store and say "Ford 400",
and I get replies ranging from:
"Small Block Chevy 400?"
"You stroked a 351 WIndsor?"'
"Ford didn't make a 400."

But when I say "Ford 400M", then they understand that I want a 1970s tall deck Cleveland related parts and info.

Hence I use the term "400M", it saves me time and headache.


But back to PC hardware...

I have 4 Seagates in this PC, and only had trouble with the one. BUT checking the total run time of the drives (I bought them in pairs) of the "other" drive, is just under 6 months, out of a year, many time running for 3-5 days straight (I would just let the machine idle at night). And I tend to disable the "spindown" so that is ~6 months of constant use.
The first pair is almost 8 months run time under the same conditions...
I lost a spindle bearing, so the data part of the "drives" themselves are doing pretty good.

The biggest issue of the whole thing was the RAID 0, 1 drive failing takes the whole array down...
Plus, when I purchased these, the 2TB WDs were about $140-150, so $72 for the first, and $61 for the 2nd is $133, so it is still less expensive for that "slot" than a 2GB WD would have been.

Although, I wish the WDs were a bit less expensive too!
These were actually the last drive on my list for this machine.

Barracuda

[vienna]

Originally Posted by BarracudaUAK

No problem, I'm the OP, and I brought up the cars...

Plus my first post included: "mechanical" hard drives, "RPM", references to "speed" and performance... and Cars are hardware, and they put computers in cars now...

The way I see it, completely legit!

You, sir, would have made a very good diplomat...




<O>