[clug] forget RAID?

[Craig Small]

On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 08:31:36PM +1100, Tomasz Ciolek wrote:
> and I am told by people in EMC, who deal with storage for living, 
> that they deliberately mix batches of disks into a single stock 
> pile before installing disks...
> 
> I epxect most GOOD rais suppliers do that too. 
Yes, I have heard that too.

RAID has its place, very good RAID can be very good as it can solve a
lot of the usual problems you can get with disk arrays.  While a drive
rebuild can stress a drive, so can backing up or restoring, depending
on what you are using to connect to it.

A lot of the problem is there are many, many crap "RAID cards" out
there.  People see this use this, think all RAID is like that and come
to the obvious conclusion that RAID is awful (which is pretty much is
in that case).

> In my experience temperature and a dodgy power supply is more likely to be a cause of disk death, than batch issues.
Or something wrong with the chassis design, like disk 1 always goes in a
certain model. Had that happen to me, not 0 not 2, always disk 1.
Working in large data centres gives you a nice overview of the aggregate
reliability of stuff, if you know roughly how much of each is there.

 - Craig
-- 
Craig Small      GnuPG:1C1B D893 1418 2AF4 45EE  95CB C76C E5AC 12CA DFA5
http://www.enc.com.au/                      MIEE         Debian developer
csmall at : enc.com.au                      ieee.org           debian.org