> -----Original Message----- > From: Martin K. Petersen [mailto:martin.petersen@xxxxxxxxxx] > Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2009 7:06 PM > To: lrhorer@xxxxxxxxxxx > Cc: linux-raid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Subject: Re: Adding a smaller drive > > >>>>> "Leslie" == Leslie Rhorer <lrhorer@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > >> I do think, however, that you are underestimating the power of > >> industry associations and standards bodies. System manufacturers, > >> enterprise customers and governments absolutely refuse to buy things > >> that are not compliant. So this is not about whether you can legally > >> cut corners. It is about being able to sell your product in the > >> first place. > > Leslie> So a company like Apple could never compete with IBM? > > Who says that Apple doesn't care about the LBA count? Most desktop I'm afraid you missed my point entirely. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Apple was strictly proprietary, and few businesses, governmental agencies, or military applications would purchase Apple machines. Yet it sold well in the consumer sector. Despite not being based upon an open standard, Apple was able to compete. > system vendors use disk imaging to perform burn-in and software preload. > It matters to them. Same goes for OS deployment on the business desktop > end of things. > > I don't have any idea whether more desktop class drives are sold > individually as opposed to as part of a new computer. But that doesn't > really matter. Because fact is that it's the system vendors that set > the bar for standards compliance. And consumers ignore it. For the most part, they could not care less. > I am not sure what the incentive would be for the drive vendors to > provide different capacities/firmware loads for drives sold directly to > consumers. By sealing his oil barrels with 39 drops of solder, rather than 40, John D. Rockefeller saves some $50,000 a year. Take a few pennies, multiply by 100 million or so consumers, and you wind up with a million bucks. I don't know that they can save a few cents by skimping on the number of sectors, but if someone can, it is a powerful incentive to ignore the spec for consumer class drives. > Until the IDEMA LBA spec was ratified we were talking about > capacity variations of a few percent within a given class. I don't > think consumers care about that nearly as much as we computer > professionals do. Which is my point, and since the systems to which I refer are owned by me personally, rather than by my company, I have a similar perspective in this case. > However, there's only a handful of disk drive manufacturers. And they > are all pretty good at adhering to existing standards for the reasons I > outlined earlier. Namely that they have to sell exactly the same drives > to customers with higher standards than aforementioned dyslexic monkeys. I don't doubt it for a second. To be sure, I'm not saying it will happen, or even that it is highly likely, just that it is possible, and with my luck, it would be the 1 out of 100 that winds up in my hands. > Leslie> Well, first of all, in this very thread someone gave an example > Leslie> of a modern drive which is apparently non-compliant. > > That turned out to be a drive sitting behind a RAID controller which > reserves a portion of the drive for its own use. That's reassuring. -- 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
