Comment by tharkun__ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tharkun__ | Hacker News Reader

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This has been the "conventional wisdom" for a very long time. Is this one of those things that get "lost with time" and every generation has to rediscover it?

Like, 25+ years ago I would've bought hard drives for just my personal usage in a software raid making sure I don't get consecutive serial numbers, but ones that are very different. I'd go to my local hardware shop and ask them specifically for that. They'd show me the drives / serial numbers before I ever even bought them for real.

I even used different manufacturers at some point when they didn't have non consecutive serials. I lost some storage because the drives weren't exactly the same size even though the advertized size matched, but better than having the RAID and extra cost be for nothing.

I can't fathom how anyone that is running drives in actual production wouldn't have been doing that.

It’s inconvenient compared to just ordering 10x or however many of the same thing and not caring. The issue with variety too is different performance characteristics can make the array unpredictable.

Of course, learned experience has value in the long term for a reason.

I had to re-learn this as well. Nobody told me. Ordered two drives, worked great in tandem until their simultaneous demise. Same symptoms at the same time

I rescued what could be rescued at a few KB/s read speed and then checked the serial numbers...

I personally like to get 1 of every animal if I can.

I just get 1/3 Toshiba, 1/3 WD, 1/3 Seagate.

Nearly every storage failure I've dealt with has been because of a failed RAID card (except for thousands of bad quantum bigfoot hard drives at IUPUI).

Moving to software storage systems (ZFS, StorageSpaces, etc.) has saved my butt so many times.

Exactly this.

I mostly just buy multiple brands from multiple vendors. And size the partitions for mdadm a bit smaller.

But even the same model where it's 2 each from bestbuy, Amazon, newegg, microcenter, seems to get me a nice assortment of variety.

Same thing I did except I only wanted WD Red drives. I bought them from Amazon, Newegg, and Micro center. Thankfully none of them were those nasty SMR drives, not sure how I lucked out.

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