When will I learn, that Seagate drives suck! 

So the last thing I want to do this weekend is spend time swapping hard drives in my file servers and making backups of my data just in case. But, Seagate drives that I've been rocking for the last few years decided it would be a great time to start causing me headaches. I should have learned by now. 

In the server I call resource, I had not one, but two 1.5 TB drives decide to crap out on me, one was a complete failure, the other started throwing S.M.A.R.T time out errors when trying to poll the drive, so I had to do an emergency swap there. The shit bit (kind of) this is part of a RAID0 disk set, which is a backup of my server Storage, so a quick drive to Canada computers and $230 bux later, the two drives are swapped and as of this post I'm in the process of copying 5.3 TB +/- a few GB of data from Storage to Resource. About 1.3 TB has finished copying over thus far. 

Now if swapping two drives in one machine isn't enough excitement for a weekend, It gets even better, I have another RAID0 disk set in Resource that is also a backup of Storage (This container is about 7.5 TB of data) and one of the disk is throwing S.M.A.R.T time out errors as well. So I guess, I will be replacing that drive as well. 

To compound the problem and is making me nervous, in Storage my primary file server of about 12.55 TB of space, one of the disks decided to have it's own issues and drop out of the RAID container, it was time out issues, but was still showing as OK, but even after trying to add it back into the RAID group, it's still having time out issues. So another Seagate Drive is probably on it's way out. So for Sunday, I had to rush to Canada Computers and pick up a couple of more two TB Seagate drives. I'm monitoring the rebuild and nervously waiting for it to finish rebuilding, at the rate it's going, it should be finished sometime late Monday. 

I need to think of a solution to my long term data backups, I like having a live data set, with a back up of the data that can be quickly copied over, but now I'm thinking I need a 3rd copy of my data, but preferably offsite. My options there are either tape backups, which would be awesome! but expensive at least for the start up, make a full backup of all of my data which will be about (depending on compression) 15 ~ 20 LTO4 tapes, then do weekly incremental backups that to ensure that all new data is being written to tape. 

Or I build another file server and use it to have a 3rd copy of my data, If I wasn't worried about bandwidth issues, I would host offsite (but where) and make sure the data is synced nightly, but for that I would need about 20+ TB of disk space, and someone generous enough to host it there.