bok's stats

[vaughan]

...
And as most RAID arrays feature disks of the same age, they have the uncanny tendency to fail just when changing another, earlier failed disk...

Semi related to this, I bought 6 identical Dell Optiplex 990 PCs from a former employer about 18 months ago. They were all Intel I7-2600k CPUs with 16GB DDR3 RAM and WD Blue 1TB HDDs. I have had 4 of the 6 machines die from HDD failures in the last month. I have already got replacement drives on standby for when the remaining 2 machines fail. The odd thing is that the disk failures all coincided with re-boots after installing Windows 7 updates!

[Dirk Broer]

The odd thing is that the disk failures all coincided with re-boots after installing Windows 7 updates!

Better install Linux, just to be sure....

[Dirk Broer]

Much too basic!
RAID 0 (Shit, but fast. Suicide for dummies and gamers. One drive gone, everything gone. Don't try this at home. The more disks you use in RAID 0, the faster it gets -reading and writing) .
RAID 1 (Mirroring only, does not enhance performance one bit and it is a lousy way of backing up. The more disks you use in RAID 1, the slower it gets).
RAID 5 (RAID for cheap skates: it will allow one disk failure, but all-to-often a second disk fails just when replacing the first. The more disks you use in RAID 5, the better -faster in reading- it gets).
RAID 6 (RAID for less cheap skates: it will allow two disks failures, but all-to-often a third also disk fails just when replacing the first two. The more disks you use in RAID 6, the better it gets).

You can also try to combine raid levels.
RAID 10 (= RAID 1 and RAID 0 combined= Mirrored Shit).
Having two -or more- RAID 5 arrays running under RAID 0 gets you RAID 50.
But you should go, IMHO, for RAID 60 which is also known as dual drive failure protection and is built from -at least- eight disk drives configured as two -or more- RAID 6 arrays, and stripes stored data and two sets of parity data across all disk drives in both -or more- RAID 6 arrays.

Performance-wise, why not use 8 arrays of 8 disks each? Okay, that's 64 disks, but each 8-disk array may lose up to two disks before it gets critical.

[Dirk Broer]

The odd thing is that the disk failures all coincided with re-boots after installing Windows 7 updates!

Already tried to re-format them?

[vaughan]

Already tried to re-format them?

No; just replaced them.

[Dirk Broer]

Big chance that they could be useful again, once formatted.
You could change those systems to run the OS (Windows 10 or Linux) from SSD,
while BOINC -with all its IO- runs from the HDD.