On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 8:08 AM, Tom Buskey <t...@buskey.name> wrote: > They found little difference between enterprise and consumer grade lifetimes.
That doesn't surprise me. They're often the exact same hard disk assembly, just with different firmware, or maybe a different PCB. Despire marketing claims to the contrary, I wouldn't expect firmware tweaks to significantly improve reliability in most cases. (*Most*. Reportedly, bad design in the firmware of IBM's DeskStar drives may have causes some of their problems back during the "DeathStar" plague.) > Once drives have errors, they multiply quickly. That much is explained by received wisdom: Modern hard drives are designed with a certain amount of redundency. They use ECC on a block-by-block basis (helping recover from single-bit errors on-the-fly), and they have a certain number of spare blocks. For I/O to start being failed to the OS, the problems have to have overwhelmed the drive's internal mechanisms. (For example, maybe the spare blocks are all used up.) Glitches that previously could be compensated for instead now yield I/O errors. -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
