Disks which belong to the IBM Deskstar families 75GXP and 120GXP have some issues:
Over 50% of the IBM Deskstar 75GXP IDE disks in the trailers have needed to be replaced due to mechanical failure.
This family of disks is fairly new, and those that are in the trailers are
still functioning; however, IBM has released a
spec sheet
with a handy chart on page 2. Under "Reliability", there is an entry which reads:
Recommended power-on hours (monthly) 333
Just more than 11 hours per day. Compare this to an article from
storagereview.com dated 03/06/2002
and titled "More on 120GXPs and servers" where IBM tech support allegedly
states "the drive is intended to be on for no more than about 8 hours a day."
Disclaimer: The following was discovered during testing. Support of 3Ware IDE RAID controllers is NOT implied.
While wrestling with continued RAID5 array degradation, 3Ware tech support informed us that Western Digital hard drives don't play well with the 3Ware Escalade IDE RAID controller. A disk will timeout and the controller will drop the disk from the array, putting the array into a degraded state. This is problematic if two drives happen to timeout. (see RAID0, RAID5 and Array Degradation )