Vivek Khera wrote: > > On May 10, 2006, at 12:41 AM, Greg Stark wrote: > > > Well, dollar for dollar you would get the best performance from > > slower drives > > anyways since it would give you more spindles. 15kRPM drives are > > *expensive*. > > Personally, I don't care that much for "dollar for dollar" I just > need performance. If it is within a factor of 2 or 3 in price then > I'll go for absolute performance over "bang for the buck". That is really the issue. You can buy lots of consumer-grade stuff and work just fine if your performance/reliability tolerance is high enough. However, don't fool yourself that consumer and server-grade hardware is internally the same, or has the same testing. I just had a Toshiba laptop drive replaced last week (new, not refurbished), only to have it fail this week. Obviously there isn't sufficient burn-in done by Toshiba, and I don't fault them because it is a consumer laptop --- it fails, they replace it. For servers, the downtime usually can't be tolerated, while consumers usually can tolerate significant downtime. I have always purchased server-grade hardware for my home server, and I think I have had one day of hardware downtime in the past ten years. Consumer hardware just couldn't do that. As one data point, most consumer-grade IDE drives are designed to be run only 8 hours a day. The engineering doesn't anticipate 24-hour operation, and that trade-off passes all the way through the selection of componients for the drive, which generates sigificant cost savings. -- Bruce Momjian http://candle.pha.pa.us EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +
