On 1/25/2010 6:23 PM, Simon Breden wrote:
By mixing randomly purchased drives of unknown quality, people are taking unnecessary chances. But often, they refuse to see that, thinking that all drives are the same and they will all fail one day anyway...
I would say, though, that buying different drives isn't inherently either "random" or "drives of unknown quality". Most of the time, I know no reason other than price to prefer one major manufacturer to another.
And, over and over again, I've heard of bad batches of drives. Small manufacturing or design or component sourcing errors. Given how the resilvering process can be quite long (on modern large drives) and quite stressful (when the system remains in production use during resilvering, so that load is on top of the normal load), I'd rather not have all my drives in the set be from the same bad batch!
Google is working heavily with the philosophy that things WILL fail, so they plan for it, and have enough redundance to survive it -- and then save lots of money by not paying for premium components. I like that approach.
-- David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
