On Tue, February 2, 2010 01:26, James C. McPherson wrote: > The engineering ratings are different to what you can buy from > your local corner PC store, and the firmware is different. The > qualification is done with the assumption that the disks will be > spinning every single second for a number of years, and that > they will have a much, *much* higher duty cycle than consumer > grade hardware. > > Please stop assuming that all this only costs a few pennies. > It doesn't.
I'm pretty doubtful that the hardware differs from what I can buy from Newegg or whatever *IF* I buy the same enterprise-grade drive model (WD S25 or RE-4, say, rather than Caviar Blue) (I don't know what WD drives, if any, are currently qualified for use in any Sun products.) Just to be clear, are you asserting that? Or are you only asserting that the drives that get qualified are not the cheap drive models most easily found at your handy corner PC store? (I have less trouble believing they might have non-standard microcode.) I'm simply not Sun's market (home NAS); $1000 disk drives simply do not exist in my home; my budget doesn't stretch that far. And I do find it somewhat offensive that software, controller, and drives can't find enough common standards to actually be able to work (and I'll pay the money I need for the duty cycle I need; but in fact my home gear has run 24/7 since 1985, and I've had very little problem with disk drives. In fact drives most often die for me when the equipment is power-cycled). (I've still got the corpse of at least one 300MB drive from long ago that I paid $1500 for, come to think of it!) -- 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
