I have been using Slackware for over 10 years now and I know this has
nothing to do with Slack but I thought I would throw that in there for the
hell of it.

Anyway over the last ten years I have noticed something that's a little
disturbing as far as the filesystem/hardrives are concerned.

Over the years I have been downloading, testing and then rming very large
files. The drives I have used to do this work on have always inevitably
failed. I have been through 5 drives in the last ten years, and now the
sixth is starting to fail.

The symptoms are always the same, I will be working with a large file and
there will be a lockup, not a hard lockup but the more I mess with the
computer trying to kill the offending app the harder the lockup gets until
I finally have to just do a hard reset. As the 'puter reboots, it of
course, runs e2fsck and finds a few bad inodes and fixes things up and
we're back to normal again. But as time goes by, over several weeks maybe,
the problem gets worse and worse as far as working with large files is
concerned.

The computer may run fine as long as I just use the computer normally,
such as surfing the net and doing email and that sort of thing. But if I
do anything with large files there will be a crash to contend with and I
finally have to replace the drive.

I have tried reformatting to see if a fresh filesystem would help but to
no avail.

I really don't think it is the fault of the drives but I could be wrong
there too, it's been known to happen.
And before you ask, I use Western Digital drives. I use western digital
for the root filesystem and the data drives. I have never had a failure
on the root filesystem drive. Just the work drive.
BTW, my computers run 24/7 the uptime on this one was 206 days until this
last problem began.


Here are some of my thoughts on the situation:

The constant writing and erasing of the drive just wears the media itself
out.

But why??? Aren't the drives still magnetic media? Ya know, it's been so
long since I studied hardware I don't even know what they have been doing
in the advancement of harddrives in the past few years.

I'm just writing this to get some others' thoughts on this situation.
Your thoughts and suggestions are all welcome.

Thanks,
Widgeteye