On Wed, 2004-05-19 at 23:39, Mark Hahn wrote: > the fact is that disks are dirt cheap now, so whining about their > robustness is kind of silly. On this point I can't agree with you. Sure, hardware is dirt cheap but DATA is not. So long as the drive makers are up-front about it so end-users know that they MUST have mirroring then fine, but they aren't. Users are lead to believe the products are "ultra reliable" and therefore are not as careful with their storage and backup solutions as they should be. At this point I must correct myself. I had said the drive was a Maxtor but I was wrong. Just checked smartctl and in fact it is a Segate ST3120026A. A google turns up the drives home page: http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/marketing/detail/0,1081,580,00.html Quotes from the product data sheet (PDF on that page): "The worlds toughest and Quietest High-Performance desktop drive with ..." "A proven rugged design for increased reliability" "Best-Fit Applications · Mainstream and High-Performance PCs · Entry-Level ATA Servers, including RAID · Cost-Effective Network Attached Storage" I don't seem to see a footnote that says "50% of drives will fail in a year or less..." Going by the product sheet and the fact the drive has a 3 year warranty you'd think you would be relatively safe. Nope... > if you don't like trusting a single > disk, use raid: that's what it's for. yes, it's less of a clean > solution on small machines, but there is *no* reliability problem > on servers, since raid5 is fast and cheap and you get to choose > your comfort level of bomb-proof-ness. I don't totally disagree but there are many other considerations. I may have RAID 5 on my server but the server is in a data-center thats 2000km away. Shipping new drives and having a support call to install them can get very expensive not to mention down time. Never the less I believe we are all slowly coming to the realization that mirroring is now the minimum we should deploy even on the desktop. Its not really fair to the consumer though. Basically if they make the drives really bad then we will buy twice as many of them. Of course this only works for a while until a competitor destroys them (witness what happened to the American auto makers when the Japanese started making cars.) > diskless PCs make HUGE amounts of sense; AMEN! Having a hard drive in a PC on your desktop is completely senseless in any office with more than about 2 desktops. LTSP ( www.ltsp.org ) all the way! John Lange - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
