Well, I dunno if I would say Tier 1 to get it? There are boat loads of people using them in ZFS environments, hell, even a slew of Solaris Admins running a couple as a log device at home...
Intel's current gen of even the Enterprise variants are actually cheap as hell now. From: Martin Blackstone [mailto:mblackst...@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, October 17, 2009 5:19 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: "Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009 | Storage Bits | ZDNet.com" Not yet. The write speed of SSD's still isn't that good. It's on reads that it's great. They still have high failure rates and cost is still extravagant. They are great in places like banks and stock brokers who read data and 1 second can cost a million bucks. Companies like EMC and NetApp are just starting to come out with them. Today to get them you have to buy truly tier one storage From: Andrew Levicki [mailto:and...@levicki.me.uk] Sent: Saturday, October 17, 2009 11:13 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: "Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009 | Storage Bits | ZDNet.com" In my opinion, we're on the cusp of seeing solid state storage becoming the norm and we will be able to put hard drives out to pasture or use them more for backups than tapes. Although we have much faster hard disks nowadays than ever, it's amazing that we are still at the behest of such a mechanical device for our mission / business critical data. Solid state FTW. Regards, Andrew 2009/10/17 Angus Scott-Fleming <angu...@geoapps.com<mailto:angu...@geoapps.com>> Scaremongering, or legitimate things to worry about? Lots of the "Talkback" comments are that ZDNet is over the top these days, but it seems to me he's got some legitimate points. ------- Included Stuff Follows ------- Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009 | Storage Bits | ZDNet.com Disks fail While disks are incredibly reliable devices, they do fail. Our best data - from CMU and Google - finds that over 3% of drives fail each year in the first three years of drive life, and then failure rates start rising fast. With 7 brand new disks, you have ~20% chance of seeing a disk failure each year. Factor in the rising failure rate with age and over 4 years you are almost certain to see a disk failure during the life of those disks. But you´re protected by RAID 5, right? Not in 2009. Reads fail SATA drives are commonly specified with an unrecoverable read error rate (URE) of 10^14. Which means that once every 100,000,000,000,000 bits, the disk will very politely tell you that, so sorry, but I really, truly can´t read that sector back to you. One hundred trillion bits is about 12 terabytes. Sound like a lot? Not in 2009. Disk capacities double Disk drive capacities double every 18-24 months. We have 1 TB drives now, and in 2009 we´ll have 2 TB drives. With a 7 drive RAID 5 disk failure, you´ll have 6 remaining 2 TB drives. As the RAID controller is busily reading through those 6 disks to reconstruct the data from the failed drive, it is almost certain it will see an URE. So the read fails. And when that happens, you are one unhappy camper. The message "we can´t read this RAID volume" travels up the chain of command until an error message is presented on the screen. 12 TB of your carefully protected - you thought! - data is gone. Oh, you didn´t back it up to tape? Bummer! --------- Included Stuff Ends --------- More here with links: http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162 -- Angus Scott-Fleming GeoApps, Tucson, Arizona 1-520-290-5038 +-----------------------------------+ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~