On 03/27 01:40 , Les Mikesell wrote: > Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > > I would really like to see hard drives made to be more reliable, rather than > > just bigger. > I'm not sure that can be improved enough to matter. A failure of an > inexpensive part once in five years isn't a big deal other than the side > effects it might cause, and unless they can be 100% reliable (probably > impossible) you have to be prepared for those side effects anyway.
on a small scale, perhaps. when you get to an organization the size of (TBS|Hotmail|Yahoo)tho; it may make sense to spend a little more money in order to spend less labor swapping parts. the market seems to agree with you tho... which is a pretty good indictment of central planning notions (i.e. Me) vs. what really is efficient. > > I want reliable storage. > Run mirrored hot-swap drives. If one dies, replace it at some convenient > time, sync it up and keep going. I have one machine last booted in > mid-2003 that has had a couple of it's drives replaced that way. Your point is well-taken. I do keep in mind tho that I've seen multiple drives fail simultaneously or in rapid succession, and that the process of replacing drives costs time and effort. It is not as trivial as you might think, once you factor in the time to detect the failure, find the replacement (if you can), replace the drive (which may involve removing the old drive from the carrier and replacing it with the new one), and make sure it's working properly. In an ideal world it's 5 minutes of work, in the real world I usually expect to lose an hour or two dealing with a failed drive. This can be accounted as several hundred dollars of lost productivity in many cases; so it's worthwhile to spend more money on a better-quality drive sometimes. -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
