David Boreham wrote:
 >Spend a fortune on dual core CPUs and then buy crappy disks...  I bet
 >for most applications this system will be IO bound, and you will see a
 >nice lot of drive failures in the first year of operation with
 >consumer grade drives.

I guess I've never bought into the vendor story that there are
two reliability grades. Why would they bother making two
different kinds of bearing, motor etc ? Seems like it's more
likely an excuse to justify higher prices. In my experience the
expensive SCSI drives I own break frequently while the cheapo
desktop drives just keep chunking along (modulo certain products
that have a specific known reliability problem).

I'd expect that a larger number of hotter drives will give a less reliable
system than a smaller number of cooler ones.

Our SCSI drives have failed maybe a little less than our IDE drives. Hell, some of the SCSIs even came bad when we bought them. Of course, the IDE drive failure % is inflated by all the IBM Deathstars we got -- ugh.

Basically, I've found it's cooling that's most important. Packing the drives together into really small rackmounts? Good for your density, not good for the drives. Now we do larger rackmounts -- drives have more space in between each other plus fans in front and back of the drives.

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