On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 12:30:49PM -0600, TCIS List Acct wrote: > Not had any issues yet, but we're doing a round of h/w upgrades on our > M7i's and figured this was the time to do it if we were going to do it > at all.
I've probably had my hands on about 500 RE-2.0s over the years, many of which were in constant use for 5-10 years at a stretch, and in my experience the failure rate was actually much higher on the CF media than it was on the spinning HD. Obviously the old CF media is nowhere near the same quality as a modern SSD, it had no mechanisms for wear leveling or gracefully handling bad sectors, but the point is that the knee-jerk reaction of "omg spinning media in my routers is going to doom us all" actually caused far more downtime than it prevented in the long run. Regular old hard drives work just fine, and of all the hw failures I've seen on these routers over the years the HDs were actually one of the least common ones. Now with regard to the problems on the M7i/M10i REs, whatever happened there seemed to be specific to those RE-4.0/5.0s. One theory is that they chose to save $20 by using "laptop grade" (only rated for 4 hours of use a day) rather than "blade server grade" (rated for 24/7 use), and it came back to bite them. The drives in the older RE-2.0s were all IBM/Hitachi Travelstar's from before they had such a concept as "blade server rated drives", and they didn't have anything like the failure rates on the M7i/M10i. Maybe the HD manufacturers started using cheaper lower quality parts in the "laptop grade" units after that, I don't know enough about the manufacturing process to say anything intelligent on the subject. All we really know is that at the end of the day Juniper refused to admit there was a problem with the HDs (despite massive end user complaints about the failure rates), made up some Cisco "your IOS crashes are all caused by cosmic rays hitting the ram" grade bullshit about "excessive logging" causing problems (even though most routers didn't log that much, and nobody ever had problems logging that much on other REs), and simply RMA'd the REs as they broke. Thankfully nobody ever died over a had RE HD, and there are no accelerator pedals on the routers, so a little cover-up was probably to be expected and I doubt anybody will ever be called to testify in front of congress. :) -- Richard A Steenbergen <r...@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC) _______________________________________________ juniper-nsp mailing list juniper-nsp@puck.nether.net https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/juniper-nsp