In general I agree completely with what you are saying. Making reliable large capacity drives does appear to have become very difficult for the drive manufacturers, judging by the many sad comments from drive buyers listed on popular, highly-trafficked sales outlets' websites, like newegg.
And I think your 750GB choice should be a good one. I'm currently using 750GB drives (WD7500AAKS) and they have worked flawlessly over the last 2 years. But knowing that drives don't last forever, it's time I looked for some new ones, assuming they can be reasonably assumed to be reliable from customer ratings and reports. If there's one manufacturer that *may* possibly have proved the exception, it might be Samsung with their 1.5TB and 2TB drives -- see my post just a little further up. And using triple parity RAID-Z3 does seem a good idea now when using these higher capacity drives. Or perhaps RAID-Z2 with a hot spare? I don't know which is better -- I guess RAID-Z3 is better, AND having a spare available ready to replace a failed drive when it happens. But I think I read that unused drive bearings seize up if unused so I don't know. Any comments? For resilvering to be required, I presume this will occur mostly in the event of a mechanical failure. Soft failures like bad sectors will presumably not require resilvering of the whole drive to occur, as these types of error are probably easily fixable by re-writing the bad sector(s) elsewhere using available parity data in redundant arrays. So in this case larger capacities and resilvering time shouldn't become an issue, right? And there's one big item of huge importance here, which is often overlooked by people, and that is the fact that one should always have a reasonably current backup available. Home RAID users often pay out the money for a high-capacity NAS and then think they're safe from failure, but a backup is still required to guard against loss. I do have a separate Solaris / ZFS machine dedicated to backups, but I do admit to not using it enough -- something I should improve. It contains a backup but an old one. Part of the reason for that is that to save money, I filled it with old drives of varying capacity in a *non-redundant* config to maximise available space from smaller drives mixed with larger drives. Being non-redundant, I shouldn't depend on its integrity, as there is a high likelihood of it containing multiple latent errors (bit rot). What might be a good idea for a backup box, is to use a large case to house all your old drives using multiple matched drive-capacity redundant vdevs. This way, each time you upgrade, you can still make use of your old drives in your backup machine, without disturbing the backup pool - i.e. simply adding a new vdev each time... -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
