I just stumbled across a couple of interesting papers on how reliable disk drives are in the long term. We've kicked around the idea of spinning down redundant disks (to save power and maybe increase their lifetime).. it turns out this technique has a name: MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks).
http://www.lockss.org/locksswiki/files/ISandT2008.pdf http://www.bl.uk/ipres2008/presentations_day2/43_Rosenthal.pdf The second paper gets into some of the quantitative analysis that we've also been kicking around, trying to find a useful metric with which to discuss the lifetime of a given piece of data. Also interesting was the mention that 2.5" drives are more suitable to spindown-longevity than 3.5", because 2.5" drives use an off-platter parking area, while 3.5" drives park the heads on an otherwise-unused portion of the platter (so the heads still touch the platter, and corrosion eventually takes place at the point of contact). cheers, -Brian _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list [email protected] http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
