I was wondering what do you guys do to keep the HD from dying. I had the first drive die on me after about 4 months of on all the time. Now I got my 2nd drive die on my after 2 weeks. (This one might be a bad drive itself). But what's the base way to make sure the HD spins down when it's not being used. And also what do you guys do in terms of redundancy?!?!

If the drives are dying in the same box, perhaps the problem is with your boxen...

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cesman

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I'd be looking at the temperatures inside the box. Consider this: Tivos never turn off. They run 24x7, all the time. My Tivos are going on 4 years old and the hard disks are still turning. Heat is a big killer of hard drives.

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My drives are running since a long time, no problems found.

If you wants to monitor the drive temperature, install smartctl.

Those tools are reading the S.M.A.R.T. information of the drive, and it's usefull to diagnostic a faillure on a drive.

For the redundancy, you could install 2 drives in your box and use linux raid (raid 1 for morring) or use a raid adapter (promise is doing some for a bunch of $)

If you are more wealthy, you could install 3 drives or more and use raid 5, it's up to you.

Yhan

ok...I know the box gets pretty warm after a while. Especially when I had 3 HDs stack on top of each other. I'll prolly bring the box down to 2 HDs with spaces between the drives and maybe add more fans in the box. Hopefully the box won't be too loud. Also for S.M.A.R.T, I was looking for that setting on my mobo bios. If the bios doesn't have it, does smartctl help?!?!

Stand-alone Knoppmyth boxes are inherently rather small (in an effort to better suit the rest of the equipment in the living room). Controlling heat in those situations can be tough. One good way to prevent hard drive failure is to keep the hard drive elsewhere than in the box, perhaps on a remote computer over NFS. After going through the 3rd hard drive failure in 3 months, I decided to go that route and have had no issues ever since. The 2 hard drives are actually contained in a rather large, well-ventilated case in the basement (where no-one has to put up with the noise). This has the added benefit of making the box in the living room even quieter than before. The system actually boots from a CF card which in turn loads up the filesystems via NFS. Eventually I'll setup the basement computer to run as an actual MythTV backend and the frontend will be nothing but a commodity setup, but for now I still need the tuner and the Knoppmyth box to be in the same room.

While all hard drives die eventually, I think you are definitely experiencing premature failure.

Temperature can be one cause, but there are others.

I'd wonder about your power supply. A cheep one could be letting you down. Without a UPS you could be sending all sorts of shocks and sags through to the drives. Additionally, a single system with three hard drives probably should have a larger than normal power supply.

Might be worth upgrading to a better power supply, and investing in a UPS before you loose more hard drives.

Welp,
I took out the bad 200GB HD in there, got 2 HD fans + 1 PCI slot fan, and an UPS and now the box's been running for about 1 week w/ no problem and the case doesn't feel hot at all. Let see how this goes.

Thank you all for the suggestions