Yeah those big disks arrays are real sweet. One day last week I was in a data center in Arizona when the big LSI/Storagetek array in the cage next to mine had a hard drive failure. So the alarm shrieked at like 13225535 decibles continuously for hours. BEEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP. Of course since this was a colo facility it wasn't staffed on site by the idiots who own the array. BEEEEP BEEEEEEEP BEEEEEEEP for hours. So I had to stand next to this thing--only separated by a few feet and a little wire mesh--while it shrieked for hours until a knuckle-dragger arrived on site to swap the drive. Yay. So if you're going to get a fancy array (they're worth it if somebody else is paying) then make sure to *turn off the @#%@#SF'ing audible alarm* if you deploy it in a colo facility. Quoting Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 12:51, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote: > > On Wed, Nov 16, 2005 at 11:06:25AM -0600, Scott Marlowe wrote: > > > There was a big commercial EMC style array in the hosting center at the > > > same place that had something like a 16 wide by 16 tall array of IDE > > > drives for storing pdf / tiff stuff on it, and we had at least one > > > failure a month in it. Of course, that's 256 drives, so you're gonna > > > have failures, and it was configured with a spare on every other row or > > > some such. We just had a big box of hard drives and it was smart > enough > > > to rebuild automagically when you put a new one in, so the maintenance > > > wasn't really that bad. The performance was quite impressive too. > > > > If you have a cool SAN, it alerts you and removes all data off a disk > > _before_ it starts giving hard failures :-) > > Yeah, I forget who made the unit we used, but it was pretty much fully > automated. IT was something like a large RAID 5+0 (0+5???) and would > send an alert when a drive died or started getting errors, and the bad > drive's caddy would be flashing read instead of steady green. > > I just remember thinking that I'd never used a drive array that was > taller than I was before that. > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
