> 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...
My use of the word random was a little joke to refer to drives that are bought without checking basic failure reports made by users, and then the purchaser later says 'oh no, these drives are c**p'. A little checking goes a long way IMO. But each to his own. > 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. Price is an important choice driver I think we all use. But the 'drives of unknown quality' bit is still possible to mitigate by checking, if one is willing to spend the time and knows where to look. We're never going to be 100% certain, but if I read widely of numerous reports that drives of a particular revision number are seriously substandard then I am going to take that info onboard to help me steer away from purchasing them. That's all. > And, over and over again, I've heard of bad batches > of drives. Small > manufacturing or design or component sourcing errors. > Given how the > esilvering 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! Indeed. This is why it's good to research, buy what you think is a good drive & revision, then load your data onto them and test them out over a period of time. But one has to keep original data safely backed up. > 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. Yep, as mentioned elsewhere, Google have enormous resources to be hugely redundant and safe. And yes, we all try to use our common sense to build in as much redundancy as we deem necessary and we are able to reasonably afford. And we have backups. Cheers, Simon http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/ -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
